Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Re: [BLUG] help desperately needed for wireless on Debian

I should have read further initially...

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 9:33 PM, Loren Serfass
<lorenserfass331@gmail.com> wrote:
>     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

|Ubuntu/Debian

|In recent versions of Ubuntu and Debian, installing the b43-fwcutter
|package will handle everything for you:

|Toggle line numbers
|
| sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
|
|You will be asked to automatically fetch and install the firmware into
|the right location.

If this worked, then you wouldn't have the problem you have now. You
can try uninstalling and reinstalling the b43-fwcutter package. I
would check for the location of the bcm43xx_microcode5.fw file,
though. This is the firmware that it isn't seeing. The directories do
not matter if they are empty, what matters is this one file.

If this file exists in the /etc/firmware/something directory then it
isn't being seen by the kernel when it is trying to load it.
Double-check where it is looking for the file. I thought firmware was
supposed to go in "/lib/firmware" so if it is looking for it there,
but it is being stored in /etc/firmware that could be the source of
the problem. This would be odd, though, as DEB packages usually do a
good job setting things up when they have what they need.

> 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.

After you install the firmware, you probably need to unload and reload
the driver so it can see that the firmware is there. Personally, I'd
just reboot, but then I distrust unloading modules. (I started using
Linux before kernel modules, though, so I may just be old-fashioned.)

>     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.

Ignore the ndiswrapper stuff. If you did anything to set it up, back
it out. The ndiswrapper stuff will very likely conflict with the
native driver stuff.

Sorry I didn't read the whole thing the first time. :/ We'll get you
sorted out soon enough.

Cheers,
Steven Black

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