General Broadcom b43 questions - essid, disconnects
 

I seem to have a few problems with my wireless. I cant seem to immediately change my essid after boot AND when I am connected to a network, I tend to loose my connection and am not able to immediately reconnect.

First off. I'm using slackware 12.1 on my laptop with the following:
I'm using b43legacy and I have the firmware from http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...a-3.130.20.0.o

ESSID PROBLEM:
If I change my essid after boot and attempt to restart my wlan0 (or all network adapters) then it will not connect. Sometimes if I let it sit for about 15 minutes with wlan0 disabled it will eventually work when I restart it.

I am un able to turn the power off or commit changes using the iwtools. (I'm assuming that my wireless card is not fully supported by them or the driver is incomplete)


LOSING CONNECTION PROBLEM:
I tend to loose my wireless connection randomly. Sometimes it's frequent and other times it goes a long while. When it stops working It generally takes about 15 minutes for it to work again. It seems to help when I stop the interface, remove the driver, wait, load the driver, start the interface.

during this time when it's not working, 'cat /sys/class/net/wlan0/carrier' returns 0
this is checked by rc.inet1 to see if it is 1 before it decides it works. No clue what this means.

I'm assuming my reasons for not being able to reconnect right away would be related to not being able to force changes with my ESSID


I would prefer to not use any gui configurations and actually understand a bit more of what might be going on. I only use this laptop at one coffee shop so not being able to change the ESSID isn't a 'huge' problem.

i got a similiar network adapter BCM4306 rev(03),and i becoming crazy 4 it,with b43 drivers it has never worked,and some days ago i tried ndiswrapper and everything goes fine(i can suggest you to use Wicd as network manager)BUT yesterday something unknown happen and now the system(debian) doesn't recognise it...wtf...maybe the wireless part of all the linux system must be really improved,it doesn't work well yet.

I had similar problems and I changed to the ndiswrapper and everything has worked great since. Do not forget to blacklist the legacy drivers if you do go the ndiswrapper way.

I tried ndiswrapper before but I'm ashamed to say that I never really got it working. I think I had tried something along the lines of downloading the broadcom drivers for the laptop of gateway's webpage (I have the 600YGR) and unzipping the .exe to a directory in /usr/lib I wasn't quite sure which files were needed. I should try that again when I have time. But that was before I installed the firmware for b43legacy. I suppose it's possible that I wasn't paying attention and the b43legacy module was being loaded without firmware and conflicting with ndiswrapper. Thanks for the extra tip.

OH, BTW if anybody can point me in the right direction to official win32 drivers for this chipset, that would be awesome.

Here is a tutorial I followed for the Suse and the driver link is about midway down the page.

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Broadcom_...ion_under_SUSE

cool thanks

EDIT:

Larry, thanks again! I got around to testing it out the other day and those drivers worked perfectly! I didn't play with changing the essid, however the previous non functional options like 'commit' and 'power' now worked. I also never lost my connection.

I retested the gateway drivers and ndiswrapper didn't like the XP ones it auto used... I didn't want to try hacking the inf file to use the other drivers or just copying them over the XP drivers but one of them my have worked.