problem with BMC4318. After installing bcmwl5.inf, modprobe ndiswrapper gives error.
 

I'm having some difficulties getting my broadcom BCM4318 wireless card working under linux.

I'm using the 64-bit version of suse 10.0, on a new acer travelmate 4400 with an amd turion processor. lspci identifies my cards as:

06:05.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

with pciid 14e4:4318 (rev 02). I'm using the driver bcmwl5.inf suggested in the ndiswrapper wiki, and ndiswrapper version 1.2-2 that comes with the suse 10 distribution. I've also tried the building the latest ndiswrapper verion 1.4 (it installs fine, but does not recognize the hardware as present).

The driver seems to install alright (using ndiswrapper 1.2-2, but not ndiswrapper 1.4). If i enter

> ndiswrapper -l

I see

Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present


The problem is that when I try

> modprobe ndiswrapper

I get the error message

FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found.


Any help would be very much appreciated.

jn

sounds like the ko file for the old installation of ndiswrapper is still there and thus giving you the error.

Try rmmod ndiswrapper first.

then depmod -a

then modprobe ndiswrapper again.

Thanks for the suggestion. rmmod ndiswrapper doesn't seem to work. I get

> rmmod ndiswrapper
ERROR: Module ndiswrapper does not exist in /proc/modules

and the same thing when i try modprob again

> depmod -a
> modprobe ndiswrapper
FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found.

If you have any other ideas let me know.

sounds like the module file didn't make it to the right directory. Stupid question but you did do "make install" after "make" right?

Install order should be,

make uninstall
make distclean
make
make install
depmod -a
modprobe ndiswrapper

When installing ndiswrapper 1.4 I did use that order of make commands, but this version isn't working for me. For version 1.2-2 I let YAST do the install from the suse 10.0 install dvd, so I don't do any makeing.

Is there a way that I could check whether the module file is where it needs to be?

Maybe I'll try to find the source of 1.2-2, to build and install manually.

Installing the old version manually worked. I guess there must be something strange about the the automated suse 10 install of ndiswrapper.

Thanks for the help.

How, if u did, to get the radio on? I'm having a problem. I installed alll the drivers using ndiswrapper then modprobe, everything seems to respond correctly, however i still can't get onlie cuz my radio is off. I'm running suse 10 Eval on a Acer TM 4401LMi... Any help would be appreciated...

I also had problems enabling my wireless card. I need to use acer_acpi:

http://www.archernar.co.uk/acer_acpi...acpi_main.html

It sounds like your system is similar to mine, so hopefully this will help.

jnummela I F*****ING LOVE YOU.
I was going crazy getting the damn card to work. NDISWRAPPER seemed to work like a charm, but it wouldn't scan or let me change the ESSID.
I WAS STUCK.
then i isntalled acer_acpi and it's ALIVE.

THANKS MAN, I OWE YOU BIG TIME

Jnummela,

if you have the time, I think it would be very helpful to put this link in the Acer laptop section of the HCL. I'm betting there are a number of Acer users out there stumbling over this exact problem.

Hey. Thanks for advice. I used acer_acpi and it helped. I managed to turn the radio of my wireless on. However, now i have encountered a different problem. I can scan for avaiolable networks but i can't change the essid or key/encryption using iwconfig or kwifimanager. I get errors... Basically i can see the AP's but i can't connect to them. Any ideas on how to fix this issue?

I'm running Suse 10 x86_64 on a Acer Travelmate 4400 series, 4401LMi.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

I'm not an expert, and this problem doesn't sound like one I've encountered, so I probably can't be of much help. Setting the essid with iwconfig works fine for me. What is the error message you get?

I too have a Travelmate 4400. I noticed when I have my mode set to Managed as opposed to Auto, it won't let me set my SSID. That may fix your problem. The problem I now face is that everything appears well, but IP traffic does not flow. I have a good link, and my encryption key is correct, but when I go to renew DHCP or set a static IP, I get no success. Any ideas?

Could you post some of the errors you're seeing when you run DHCP (check in /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog). Also, if you set a static IP, do you also set up a default gateway with route and add your ISP's DNS servers to your /etc/resolv.conf? Missing one of those steps can cause a static IP address to appear to fail.

Actually, that was the weird thing, there were no errors. But that problem was resolved, but then it would not let me change ESSID or AP MAC. Then for some reason, it just started working, and hasent given me any problems since. Go figure...
Anyway thanks for the help though