Acer Aspire 3023, BCM 43xx, FC4 Trouble

Hi there, Im new to Linux, wanting to make the shift from Win XP. I've got a Acer Aspire 3023 that has the broadcom BCM4318 Wireless card built in. I've updated to the 2.6.17 Kernel using Yum and thus the system has recognized the wireless card, using the BCM 43xx driver.

Now this is as far as I am, I try and activate the device and I get the message:

'Determining IP information for eth1... failed; no link present. Check cable?'

The backlight on the wireless button on the laptop does not come on, even when I press it (unlike Windows where it starts up on startup).

The device appears in both the 'devices' and 'hardware' tabs of the Net Config....

Am I missing something?

Any help would be much appreciated..

Yes, a couple of things..........

First the bcm43xx module only works at 11Mbs at best (sorry but it will get better in the future). You would do better for now to use ndiswrapper and the Windows driver for the built-in wireless device(full 54Mbs speed connection possible).
Second the wireless modules in the pre-built kernel will cause problems with ndiswrapper it would be better to download the kernel source and re-build the kernel minus the bcm43xx modules. Just follow the Release note on how to get and prep the kernel source;

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/releas...ata/#sn-kernel

It would be a good idea to read/review the kernel rebuild guide before starting also;

http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/K...ild-HOWTO.html


Many like to use the rpm based ndiswrapper tools that are available;

http://atrpms.net/dist/fc4/

Myself and others like using the ndiswrapper source;

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

When you upgrade the kernel you will have to rebuild the kernel and get rid of bcm43xx modules then dowload the updated ndiswrapper rpm package. With the ndiswrapper source all you (as root) need to do is (after booting to the new kernel);

make distclean
make
make install
modprobe ndiswrapper
service network restart

Takes about 1-2 minutes on my system. In either case you will need the recommended Windows driver from the known working wiki (link at the ndiswrapper site above).
From the Wiki;

# Notebook: Acer Aspire 3023WLMi

* Kernel 2.6.12 vanilla RPM for Fedora Core 4
* Chipset: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 802.11/g Wireless LAN
* pciid: 14e4:4318
* Driver: ndiswrapper v1.3rc1 with bcmwl5a.inf or bcmwl5.inf (either works) ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/note...0_5020/driver/ (Broadcom, 12/22/2004, v3.100.46.0)
* Other: acerhk v0.5.27 compiled and loaded with /sbin/modprobe acerhk autowlan=1 poll=0 force_series=5020 verbose=3 usedritek=1. wlan0 can be activated with ifup or the Network Configuration GUI tool. The LED button blinks very dimly when the card is searching for APs.
* works flawlessly (without acerhk) on ArchLinux 0.7.1, kernel 2.6.16-2, ndiswrapper 1.12.



Now unlike Windows the wireless interface LED does not light-up unless data is actually present on the device, some find this OK others do not.

tbh i've tried to compile my own custom kernel and its led no-where but system lockups...

newbie-friendly guides is something im having a hard time finding.


And out of curiosity:
If I still wish to activate the WiFi using the built in driver, how do I do so?

Ckeck/have something in your /etc/modprobe.conf file like;

alias eth1 bcm43xx

Check/create your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 file, sample below (assuming dhcp);

# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
IPV6INIT=no
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes
TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=
DHCP_HOSTNAME=MyComputerNameHere
IPADDR=
DOMAIN=
ESSID=
CHANNEL=1
MODE=Auto
RATE=Auto

If both are set then try something (as root of course) like;

service network restart

In case you change your mind;

Building your own kernel is not that hard (once you get used to it) really.

Since you only need to make one minor changes to the already working config file (/boot/config-2.6.17<something>) it would fairly easy. The main steps involved after extracting and preparing the kernel source for building are;

make mrproper
make xconfig*
make
make modules_install
make install

* this is where you would make the change in the Networking/Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack;

# CONFIG_IEEE80211_SOFTMAC is not set

And before I forget my laptop (which I used for this reply) is an Acer Apsire 5002WLMi running a vanilla 2.6.17.4 kernel with ndiswrapper on CentOS 4.3 (highly modified);

$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 760/M760 Host (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SG86C202
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS963 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 25)
00:02.1 SMBus: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS961/2 SMBus Controller
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE]
00:02.6 Modem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Modem Controller (rev a0)
00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Sound Controller (rev a0)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.0 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.0 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet (rev 91)
00:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
00:0b.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760/761 PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter

lspci -v | grep Broad
00:0b.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Sorry about that you also need to visit;

http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/

And get the bcm43xx-fwcutter package and follow the instructions on getting the firmware files that go into /lib/firmware.

These instructions; http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail...ch/000804.html

You can also download the source rpm from FC5 extras and build the binary install rpm yourself; http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...xtras/5/SRPMS/