I've been trying for about 12 hours to get my wireless internet
connection working, using my old laptop and a new PCMCIA card. I've
followed directions from several websites (some are listed in this
email), installed lots of tools, and read lots of user forums where
people with the similar problems are going around in circles and
occasionally stumbling by luck on a solution that happens to work for
their specific situation. Before I give up, perhaps the solution will
be obvious to someone in a local group.
In brief, the websites say my card should work, and my wireless
interface is now "configured" and "active." But the "link" light on
the card is still off, and when I try wpa_supplicant the PING fails.
The iwconfig command shows that there is still no ESSID and the Access
Point is "Invalid." When I run dmesg, it shows the following messages
over and over:
bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
bcm43xx: core_up for active 802.11 core failed (-2)
I don't quite understand what these terms mean.
If someone could help, I would appreciate it tremendously!
Here are some details to explain some of the steps I've taken.
According to linuxwireless.org, my PCMCIA card should work with a b43
driver (my card is a Linksys WPC54G ver. 3 with a BCM4318 chipset), so
I've followed their directions at
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
The b43-fwcutter program runs automatically when I install it using
synaptic. Afterwards, there are b43 and b43legacy folders in
/etc/firmware/, which seems to be correct. But the connection doesn't
work. I don't know how to verify that the firmware has actually been
loaded onto the device, which the page claims is necessary.
There's a completely different set of directions at
http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000167
This approach uses ndiswrapper to translate between a windows driver
and the operating system. I've tried installing it and I successfully
loaded the module into the kernel. Everything went OK until the
section entitled "Set up networking." I used the "Network Settings"
GUI, which takes a long time but eventually says that the wireless
interface is active. When I say "ifup eth2" to the terminal, it says
"interface eth2 already configured." However, this doesn't solve the
ESSID and Access Point problems, and the directions don't help.
Thanks,
Loren
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