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

I've had a similar adventure with a broadcom chipset on a friend of mine's lappy some months ago.

It was (is) running a pretty standard slack32 13.0 and I recall having trouble with both the bcm chipset installed and the pcmcia card he was using which had the same chip.

Long story short, what made it work was using fw-cutter or whatever it's called and using the force option on a driver whose checksum it didnt like (that I downloaded from some spyware-laden windows driver website) and it produced a proper set of firmware modules.

Another note: Slack uses Wicd as the default method of controlling wifi interfaces in the gui, and it's been my experience that it's the least error-prone (if you're not familiar it consists of a python-based control panel and a daemon, just make sure you're a member of netdev).

Also it's been my experience that some laptops seem to have an airplane mode switch that just kills the antenna, but the chipset stays active and tries to behave properly but can't actually connect to anything.

And one last thing, I don't know about debian, but some distros make ifconfig and ifconfig -a do different things. IE without the -a it only displays currently activated interfaces. It wouldnt hurt to make sure you're not trying to interface with a software ghost interface when the real one is quietly inactive.

Good luck, and hopefully someone will make a wifi card worth owning one of these days >.>
-a

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

> Tonight I took off ndiswrapper and reinstalled b43-fwcutter.
> Now, when I do "b43-fwcutter -i" (asking for information, not
> extracting the driver) on every file from the CD that looks like it
> might contain a driver, I get this:
> Sorry, the input file is either wrong or not supported by b43-fwcutter.
> This file has an unknown MD5sum ad6d6894b48c702efcd8d85535e82777.

...Same for bcm43xx-fwcutter (at least the one from synaptic).
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Re: [BLUG] help desperately needed for wireless on Debian

Hi,
This is an update. Thanks for your help and input.
First, I mistyped when I said that the b43 and b43legacy folders were
in /etc/firmware/. They were really in /lib/firmware/--but none of
the files had names resembling bcm43xx*.
Tonight I took off ndiswrapper and reinstalled b43-fwcutter.
Now, when I do "b43-fwcutter -i" (asking for information, not
extracting the driver) on every file from the CD that looks like it
might contain a driver, I get this:
Sorry, the input file is either wrong or not supported by b43-fwcutter.
This file has an unknown MD5sum ad6d6894b48c702efcd8d85535e82777.

I think this may have been why I moved over to ndiswrapper, but that
was a couple days ago and I can't remember (moving in circles again).

Loren

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Your experience is different than mine.
>>
>> Maybe I have it backwards.
>
> Yeah, I just checked my backups from the laptop. As of Ubuntu 9.10 it
> was using a wireless device of eth1.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
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Re: [BLUG] help desperately needed for wireless on Debian

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Your experience is different than mine.
>
> Maybe I have it backwards.

Yeah, I just checked my backups from the laptop. As of Ubuntu 9.10 it
was using a wireless device of eth1.

Cheers,
Steven Black
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Re: [BLUG] help desperately needed for wireless on Debian

And from the Lucid Beta2 Live CD:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.32-19-generic #28-Ubuntu SMP Wed Mar 31 17:46:20 UTC
2010 i686 GNU/Linux
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"nexdoor"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:24:B2:07:74:A4
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=52/100 Signal level=52/100
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:39 AM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
> Your experience is different than mine.
>
> [root@mepis85dell mark]# uname -a
> Linux mepis85dell 2.6.32-1-mepis-smp #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 15 18:52:01 EDT
> 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
> [root@mepis85dell mark]# iwconfig
> lo        no wireless extensions.
>
> eth0      no wireless extensions.
>
> wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"nexdoor"
>          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:24:B2:07:74:A4
>          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=27 dBm
>          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
>          Encryption key:4E62-5E69-A937-A911-636E-92C2-92
>          Power Management:off
>          Link Quality=70/100  Signal level=70/100
>          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
>          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
>
> [root@mepis85dell mark]#
>
>
>
>
> Steven Black wrote:
>>
>> The wlan0 vs eth[0-9] thing varies by kernel release as nearly as I
>> can tell. I think they're mostly normalizing the kernel names at this
>> point, and the newer kernels I've used all used the eth name instead
>> of wlan. I've not seen wlan used for a year or more in the Ubuntu
>> world.
>>
>> Wireless networking is tricky in any Linux distro -- in part because
>> of manufacturers, and in part due to the FCC.
>>
>> ifconfig <no options> will show you all your ethernet devices.
>>
>> iwconfig <no options> will note all the ethernet devices with wireless
>> capabilities.
>>
>> Sometimes, depending on the software you have installed, these lists
>> will include things other than real physical devices.
>>
>> In this case SimplyMEPIS would have exactly the same problems. This is
>> a Linux kernel issue and not a distro issue. As near as I can tell
>> from my research, Broadcom -- the chipmaker -- does not allow any
>> Linux distro to ship with their firmware. Of course, this may be
>> different for distros willing to pay...
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Steven Black
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:14 PM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think you need to be using wlan0 or similar rather than eth2.
>>>
>>> FWIW, straight Debian is a PITA to configure wireless on. I prefer the
>>> Debian stable derivative SimplyMEPIS, that has all the desktop
>>> enhancements baked in. Life's too short.
>>>
>>> MEPIS is KDE. If you prefer Gnome, Ubuntu or Mint would good
>>> alternatives.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark Warner
>>> MEPIS Linux
>>> Registered Linux User #415318
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>
>
>
> --
> Mark Warner
> goin' mobile with MEPIS Linux
> Registered Linux User #415318
>
>
>
>

--
Mark Warner

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

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
> Your experience is different than mine.

Maybe I have it backwards.

I really thought I used to have an wlan entry in
/etc/networks/interfaces and when my driver started using eth1 instead
I lost my wifi networking. (I had to create an interfaces file entry
for eth1.) Unfortunately that laptop is in the process of being
replaced, so I can't just check.

Of course, the wifi chipset in that laptop worked via the command-line
but none of the GUI tools saw it properly for several releases. I
think the device name changed to eth1 when the GUI stuff started
working. If I'm remembering it backwards, it would explain things if
the GUI tools were looking for 'wlan' devices by name...

In any case, the fact that any two drivers use the same device name is
a feature of Linux. In many UNIX-like environments the device names
are different for different drivers. It is possible (probably, even)
the change in device name only happened for my particular driver.
Fortunately there are good tools to tell you what names the system
sees in case it changes the names again...

Cheers,
Steven Black
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Re: [BLUG] help desperately needed for wireless on Debian

I am running kubuntu 10.04 BETA2 right now, and my wireless NIC is called WLAN0. I do recall seeing a Wireless NIC called ethX in gentoo a few years back ...

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:22:24PM -0400, Steven Black wrote:
> The wlan0 vs eth[0-9] thing varies by kernel release as nearly as I
> can tell. I think they're mostly normalizing the kernel names at this
> point, and the newer kernels I've used all used the eth name instead
> of wlan. I've not seen wlan used for a year or more in the Ubuntu
> world.
>
> Wireless networking is tricky in any Linux distro -- in part because
> of manufacturers, and in part due to the FCC.
>
> ifconfig <no options> will show you all your ethernet devices.
>
> iwconfig <no options> will note all the ethernet devices with wireless
> capabilities.
>
> Sometimes, depending on the software you have installed, these lists
> will include things other than real physical devices.
>
> In this case SimplyMEPIS would have exactly the same problems. This is
> a Linux kernel issue and not a distro issue. As near as I can tell
> from my research, Broadcom -- the chipmaker -- does not allow any
> Linux distro to ship with their firmware. Of course, this may be
> different for distros willing to pay...
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:14 PM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think you need to be using wlan0 or similar rather than eth2.
> >
> > FWIW, straight Debian is a PITA to configure wireless on. I prefer the
> > Debian stable derivative SimplyMEPIS, that has all the desktop
> > enhancements baked in. Life's too short.
> >
> > MEPIS is KDE. If you prefer Gnome, Ubuntu or Mint would good alternatives.
> >
> > --
> > Mark Warner
> > MEPIS Linux
> > Registered Linux User #415318
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
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