eth1 not wlan0

ceviche · 02-19-2007, 03:38 PM

A little over a year ago I installed Suse 9.x (don't remember) and had major issues getting my Belkin 54g FSD7010 working on my Dell Inspiron 2650.
After days of searching I was told that it was because Suse was not recognising the wireless card as a wireless device and/or the inbuilt physical device was interfering.

I was given a command that disabled the wired port and allowed the wireless device to work. I replace the laptop not long after. Now, wanted to use it again, I did a clean install of Suse 10.2, wiping away my past efforts.

In a vain attempt the make the card work, and not finding advice similar to the advice I had received all the time ago, I installed ndiswrapper. Confused as to why I didn't have to do this last time and a generic driver that came with Suse had it going, I pressed on.
I downloaded 2 corresponding drivers from the ndiswrapper wiki list. 1 that said it was for Broadcom xxx chipset and another that said it was for the Belkin FSD7000 card. I also took the driver from the accompanying CD. The 2 downloaded were shown to be invalid by the ndiswrapper -l command and the one from the CD gave me this confirmation:
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver: bcm43XX)

Now, the card does not light up, and checking the system log I see:
Linux kernel: bcm43xx: PHY connected
Linux firmware.sh[4230]: Cannot find firmware file 'bcm43xx_microcode.fw'
Linux kernel: bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode4.fw" not available or load failed

Why did I never need to use ndiswrapper before? (aha! I think I had only 11mbps and didnt care - dodgy driver - ndiswrapper should help then)

What is this ndiswrapper error and how do i fix it?

Is it a problem that I have from iwconfig:
eth0 no wireless extensions
eth1 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:"...

Thanks.

2Gnu · 02-20-2007, 08:01 AM

I can't answer the question about not needing ndiswrapper with SuSE 9.x. There was no other option at the time.

Currently, there is an option - a native Linux "reverse-engineered" driver: bcm43xx. It's limited to 11mbps, though. It also requires firmware, which must be extracted from the Windows driver by a companion tool called fwcutter. Those packages are responsible for some of the messages you're seeing as well as some of your problem.

The bcm43xx driver and ndiswrapper don't play together. You need to remove the former and blacklist it to keep it from loading. Then, modprobe ndiswrapper and try again.

ceviche · 02-20-2007, 09:42 AM

Thanks for the reply.
I've taken off the bcm43xx stuff completely - well I unloaded each and every driver and started again.

I reinstalled bcmwl5, a driver from another location then set "ndiswrapper" as the driver, which I assume uses bcmwl5.

Well, it now seems to work, at 54mbps too it seems...

Code:

eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:11:F5:4D:5A:68
                    ESSID:"2719053"
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
                    Mode:Managed
                    Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
                    Quality:53/100  Signal level:-62 dBm  Noise level:-96 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
                              24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
                              12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
                    Extra:bcn_int=100
                    Extra:atim=0

Well... I have a new problem... Each time I restart the computer I must reset the WEP key and rescan.

Code:

Linux:/home/x/Desktop # iwconfig eth1 key open 20AE8A7051
Linux:/home/x/Desktop # iwlist scan

What can I do to make this stick?

Thanks again?

2Gnu · 02-20-2007, 11:06 AM

Each distro is different, but somewhere in /etc - network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 or something like that - there is a script file or a config file where you can enter the wireless and network settings so that they persist after reboot.

ceviche · 02-20-2007, 02:01 PM

/etc/sysconfig/network

ifcfg-eth-id-<MAC>

added lines:

WIRELESS_ESSID='<netname>'
WIRELESS_KEY='<WEP-KEY>'