Broadcom 4318 woes
Once upon a time I managed to get my Dell Inspiron B130 laptop to access my home WLAN using the FC5 native bcm43xx driver that came with BLAG 50000. Then I brought it down to my son's college in Virginia, where the hotel's wireless network seemed impenetrable to it, while my son's Windows XP laptop had no issues. Since then I haven't been able to make a wireless connection to my Netgear WG102 access point. I've spent hours troubleshooting - even reinstalling BLAG and the bcm43xx firmware from scratch - to no avail.
A quick Google reveals that the error I see in /var/log/messages seems common enough: Code:
pablo@grandpaboy=> dmesg | grep bcm43 Code:
root@grandpaboy=> lsmod | grep bcm Code:
root@grandpaboy=> iwconfig eth1 |
First make sure you aren't overlooking and security keys.
The Broadcom 4318 chip is poorly supported by bcm43xx right now. I know this because I use the same chip myself. It's no surprise to me that it worked at one point and is giving you problems now. I bet if you stuck it right next to the router you would get a connection. :) Anyway... As frustrating as it might be you probably want to grab the .inf and .sys driver files and use ndiswrapper. Though it's ndiswrapper it works better than bcm43xx. Be forewarned though that bcm43xx and ndiswrapper do not mix very well. Look up how to blacklist the bcm43xx module for your distro (it's as easy as adding two lines to a file but I don't have exact instructions) and install the driver with ndiswrapper. The repositories most likely have the ndiswrapper kernel module package for you so compiling and all that shouldn't be necessary. Also make sure you have the kernel headers, too. On a side note... there's nothing more offensive than having someone tell you to install Windows. I've been known to snap at them people... loved ones included... :) |
Mystery solved!
Mystery solved! I gave up on the bcm4318 card about a week ago and bought an Intel Pro Wireless 2200 card for about $30. I no longer saw kernel errors in the log, but the device kept complaining that the "radio kill switch was on". I went to the ipw2200 SourceForge site and found that my laptop (a Dell Inspiron B130) toggles the wireless connection on and off via the Fn+F2 key combination. And to think I've been racking my brain about this for over two months!
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I got mine working. After much grief, but it works. Somehow in the process of setting up the bcm43xx driver in the kernel, my ndiswrapper started working.
Anyway here's the related kernel .config options: CONFIG_BCM43XX=m CONFIG_BCM43XX_DEBUG=y CONFIG_BCM43XX_DMA=y CONFIG_BCM43XX_DMA_MODE=y CONFIG_IEEE80211=m CONFIG_IEEE80211_CRYPT_WEP=m CONFIG_IEEE80211_SOFTMAC=m CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS=y And here's the related lsmod listing: bcm43xx 420672 0 ieee80211softmac 31104 1 bcm43xx ieee80211 32520 2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac ieee80211_crypt 6016 1 ieee80211 ndiswrapper 179220 0 Although both bcm43xx and ndiswrapper are loaded, the ndiswrapper is the one in use. Since wlan0 is aliased to ndiswrapper and bcm43xx was wanting to use eth1. iwconfig only shows wlan0. I haven't tried unloading the bcm43xx driver to see if that affects it's operability. But so far it works with WEP and doesn't seem to have the limited range others seem to suffer from. Previously my ndiswrapper attempt installed fine. And did all of the driver stuff. Only iwconfig wasn't able to change much for the device. And network operability was nill except for pinging the local device, which seemed to work. tcpdump on a receiving machine showed no input when trying to ping it. Along with a no route to host type error on the 4318 machine. Hopefully this helps someone spend less time getting theirs going. I just got this laptop less than a week ago and have most things working. To include the dri for my ati Radeon XPress 200M with the fglrx driver. Special note on that one is make sure CONFIG_DRM=m and the module drm is NOT loaded. |
I guess I should add:
computer: Compaq Presario S5305WM (if my memory serves) kernel: 2.6.18 distro: debian sarge 3.1r3 (as installed from the CD's) distro: debian sid (still works after upgrade) ndiswrapper: 1.28 win32 drivers: bcmwl5.inf bcmwl5.sys (as came with the original XP media edition for the machine) |
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