Hi!

My dad bought a netbook (HP Mini 5101) with the Broadcom 4353 (rev.01) b/g/draft-n wireless chip and I installed Ubuntu netbook remix on it. Everything else seemed to work fine except for that wireless card. Now I've installed Linux Mint 8.

I've tried ndiswrapper with windows drivers for xp, vista and 7 but to no avail. Also the linux restricted drivers fail.

Does anybody have any experience with the chip in question?

Are you sure that this is a 4353? According to some of the sources I've seen (like this) the 4353 is part of the ID of a device and it is actually a 4324 chipset and that should be supported by the Broadcom wl driver.

According to the lspci output it was a Broadcom 4353 rev.01.

I've tried the broadcom restricted drivers without success.

Could you post the output of lspci? If it looks something like this:

Then it isn't a 4353 chipset. The Debian wiki has a nice table to correlate ID numbers to chipset numbers. The reason I'm harping on this is that if this is a 4324, then there may be some other reason why wl didn't work. If you remember why wl didn't work, that might be useful as well.

That looks like the output of the lspci command.

In terms of failing the iwconfig does not show wlan0 or eth1, only eth0 and lo.

Would it work if I'd follow the steps mentioned in that debian wiki?

Sorry

Those are highly Debian specific instructions, but given that you're using Ubuntu, it might work. Now that said, I'm pretty certain that Ubuntu would have the wl driver available as a pre-compiled package. As long as you haven't messed with the kernel, that might be a first step. One of the important lines from the Debian wiki is this:

If you were using the stock Ubuntu kernel and didn't remove those modules, then wl almost certainly wouldn't work.

I'll give it a try and see how it goes.

Ok, I fiddled around some more with the machine.

I removed the windows driver that I had tried and installed the broadcom STA driver (the restricted driver).

After that I made sure those modules (b44, b43, b43legacy and ssb) were blacklisted and modprobed the wl driver.

The output of lspci -vvvnn (attached) shows that that driver is in use.

Yet no joy with the wireless.

Attached Files

lspcioutput.txt (11.2 KB, 18 views)

You're going to need to spend some quality time with your log files and see if wl is leaving any clues as to what is happening. Also, when you say "no joy with the wireless" could you fill us in on the details of what you've done and what is happening? At this point we really need some facts to work from.

I will do that on thursday or friday and report back when I get something solid.

Ok, so I got the machine yesterday and spent the evening trying to get the wireless to work by trying out some tips I found over at the ubuntu forums.
I installed a newer version of the bcmwl-kernel-source-package (version 5.60.48.36 as opposed to 5.10.91.9) prepackaged from http://ftp2.kr.vim.org/ubuntu/pool/restricted/b/bcmwl/.

When I modprobed wl I found the following in the logs:

Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:08:00.0/net/eth2, iface: eth2)
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:08:00.0/net/eth2, iface: eth2): no ifupdown configuration found.
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): driver supports SSID scans (scan_capa 0x01).
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): new 802.11 WiFi device (driver: 'wl')
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): exported as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/1
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): now managed
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): device state change: 1 -> 2 (reason 2)
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): preparing device.
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): deactivating device (reason: 2).
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): supplicant interface state: starting -> ready
Apr 1 19:57:23 odin NetworkManager: <info> (eth2): device state change: 2 -> 3 (reason 42)
Apr 1 19:57:25 odin avahi-daemon[891]: Registering new address record for fe80::226:82ff:fe43:18d0 on eth2.*.

If you run iwconfig, do you get anything? I've done a little googling on some of the log entries you posted and there is almost no information out there about this. As far as I can tell, it either works with wl or people give up and move to ndiswrapper.

After trying several approaches I installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on the machine and voilá - problem solved. I just installed the restricted drivers. I had tried those very same drivers in Linux Mint but then it did not work, I'm not exactly sure why it worked now.

The drivers are
bcmwl-kernel-source 5.60.48.36.

Congrats! I wonder if there is some sort of kernel mismatch between the Mint kernel and the wl driver package. I know Mint is supposed to be compatible with Ubuntu packages, but kernel modules are much touchier about differences than applications are.