I have a Dell Latitude D600 notebook
Truemobile 1450 (broadcom 4309 chipset)
Dual Booting WinXP & Suse 10.2

everthing was working fine on both OS's
then I rebooted my machine from windows and logged into Suse my wireless was no longer working

I should point out 3 facts
1) I had just finished a Windows update when this happens
2) My wireless card shows up says it's working pulls an ip but I cannot even ping my router
3) this is only accuring in Suse it works fine on Windows

also this has happend before but at the time my HD was failing so I thought that was the cause (corrupted files)

steps I've tried
I have reloaded the broadcom chipset
removed the wireless device from the list in yast then added it back

I see no indication in dmesg or lspci that there is a problem with the driver module loading

I am completely stumped and going insain spending soooo much time in Windows

I am greatful for any ideas
thank you all in advance


**edit**
I have also now tried pulling the firmware from a different driver DL and this did nothing to help
I have downloaded another copy of fwcutter and will be trying that now

That shouldn't matter. Did you update SuSE?

Are you sure you're getting an IP? Post the output of ifconfig eth0 (or whatever the interface is)


Huh? The chipset is the collection of chips that make up the wireless hardware. Explain what you did in this step.

lspci lists the hardware devices on the PCI bus. Try lsmod to make sure the bcm43xx driver is loading and look for it in dmesg - dmesg|grep bcm.


If everything worked before, using firmware from a different Windows driver is probably going to introduce another issue. Use one cut from the correct driver.

I doubt that a newer version of the fwcutter tool will buy you much. As long as the correct firmware is in the correct place, that's all that matters.

Try removing and inserting the driver to look for error:
# modprobe -r bcm43xx
# modprobe bcm43xx

Then check the wireless parameters to make sure you're associated with the wireless network:
# iwconfig

If that's OK, run dhclient your_interface and report any errors.

I am at work right now and cannot give copies of ifconfig or iwconfig
however I can tell you that I'm sure I've got an IP assigned (192.168.0.102)
iwconfig shows my router info so that seems ok
basically everything seems fine just can't communicate

I will try your suggetions and get back with you tonight I hope
one other thing if I wire myself to the router I can get online under Suse so I know networking is not broken

BTW should have read
basically I reloaded the same firmware as before incase it was an issue of corrupted files

well I tried to do a kernel update and ended up with a kernel panic I tried to restore but I must have screwed up worse than I thought cause the file structure was FUBAR so....
I've decided to give Ubuntu a try, it's been installed for about 2 days now and wireless works flawlessly