trouble with BCM4318 wireless card

garyozzy · 06-11-2006, 03:44 PM

I just recently installed Ubuntu 6.06

It found my wireless card, but I'm having trouble connecting to my network. I installed the bcmwl5.inf driver with ndiswrapper but so far i'm having no luck.

i've searched high and low all over the internet (including this and ubuntu forums) for something to help me, but to no avail. any help greatly appreciated

garyozzy

zetabill · 06-11-2006, 04:13 PM

I have a linksys pcmcia card with the same chip in it... it works perfectly with ndiswrapper. I'm assuming that ndiswrapper and the driver were installed correctly, etc,etc... do you use encryption with your network? If you use WPA... try searching specifically for that. There's plenty of help about that... and there's plenty of information on wireless stuff.

Play a little bit with the iwconfig command if you can work a bit with the command line... I think you might make some progress. Whenever I have a problem connecting to the network... I usually overlooked some silly minutia with not setting the proper encryption key or looking for a different essid. I'd be happy to help you further but I don't really know what's wrong here. If you get any error messages, post them... We can't help if we don't know exactly what's wrong. It seems like playing with the settings could help a bit. Good luck.

garyozzy · 06-11-2006, 04:33 PM

The encryption on my network is WEP. The one time I had my wireless card working last year was when I turned off encryption on my network.

Code:

gary@lappy:~$ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"oznet"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4318"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:12:17:25:99:4F
          Bit Rate=11 Mb/s   Tx-Power=18 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

sit0      no wireless extensions.

zetabill · 06-11-2006, 05:04 PM

Code:

iwconfig eth1 key xxxxxxxxxx

where "xxxxxxxxxx" is your wep key.

I haven't used Ubuntu in almost a year and I just switched from Fedora Core to Slackware. In Fedora there was a GUI configuration for networking where the key could be entered and it did all its wonders whenever you wanted it to work. If I remeber correctly there was something similar to that in Ubuntu. The way I have my networking set up today, I have a script which logs me into my home wifi network. If that iwconfig line works and you can't figure out anywhere else to put that key... you can either enter that every time you want to log in, or make a script that logs you in. In Fedora a script like that would be that iwconfig line with a "ifconfig eth1 up" and I would be set. In Slackware I have to also make sure that DHCP is negotiated and all of this has to be done as superuser (at least for now until I make it otherwise). Let us know if you're successful.

garyozzy · 06-11-2006, 05:24 PM

much to my dismay, that didn't work either. In "Network Settings" (system > administration > networking), everything is set correctly. the ESSID and WEP key are entered, and it's configured to use DHCP, but I can't seem to communicate with my router. my wired LAN connection works fine. any other ideas?

garyozzy

zetabill · 06-12-2006, 02:37 PM

I'm feeling overly helpful so I did a little research.

http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=Devices
Look for your wireless card in this list. I don't know which card you have... but if you're sure you have a 4318 broadcom chip, look in the Chip ID for 4318 and look for your Product in the fields to the left (versions and revisions are important). If your exact card is listed there, then you can uninstall ndiswrapper entirely. Something tells me that if you have ndiswrapper installed then you already know you need it. Since using ndiswrapper and bcm43xx modules concurrently could cause unnecessary problems I found this:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=190177
Basically, if you're going to use ndiswrapper, you need to "shut off" the bcm43xx module. From what we've discussed already, I think all you need to do is the following:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

then find an open line and type:

Code:

blacklist bcm43xx

Save the blacklist file and Reboot your computer.

Since you're blacklisting the bcm43xx module after setting up ndiswrapper, you might have to fool around a little with your network settings to make absolutely sure that it's looking at the ndiswrapper module instead of the now missing bcm43xx module. If you're up to it, to make sure this doesn't happen, uninstall and reinstall the ndiswrapper module after blacklisting the bcm43xx module. That's what I would do, but I like playing it safe.

I hope this works, I don't really know what else to offer to you unless you come up with some errors and post them. Good luck!

garyozzy · 06-12-2006, 06:28 PM

thanks for all your help guys, but I don't know what happened. I restarted to boot into a live CD (slax, just to try it out) and when I booted ubuntu back up, wireless worked (???). Oh well! I'm happy

garyozzy