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

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:44:41PM -0400, Kirk Gleason wrote:
> 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 ...

While not having looked at the wireless codebase in the kernel in many
years, I'm pretty sure it is driver dependent as I've seen no change in
the name (one wlan, one eth) on a computer that has used wireless since
the 2.4 kernel. My best guess is that *if* any naming is being
standardized in the kernel, it is exclusive to kernel-supplied drivers
and not 3rd party ones.

--
Jeff

My other computer is an abacus.

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

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 12:34 AM, Loren Serfass
<lorenserfass331@gmail.com> wrote:
>>     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).

The CD-Rom likely has either a self-installer, a self-extracting ZIP
file, or CAB files. All of these need to be decompressed before the
cutter can find the firmware.

"cabextract" can extract CAB files.

"unzip" can extract ZIP files, as well as self-extracting zip files.

"orange" (which I've not used) can extract CAB files from
self-extracting installers.

It looks like "orange" will automatically deal with "unzip" and "cabextract".

Ultimately, you'll be looking for a ".SYS" file, this will be the
Windows driver.

Cheers,
Steven Black

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

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

This is just one more example of the importance of researching and then
only buying Linux compatible hardware. In the case of wireless it can be
difficult -- many manufacturers will use different chipsets in the same
model number -- but it can be done.

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

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:17 AM, adam <docpeppernuwer@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.

The HP Compaq tc4200 tablet I've been using for the past three years
actually has a button rather than a switch, that's on the side of left
side of the laptop and prone to be accidentally pressed.

I've learned if my wireless isn't working to try pushing it and
waiting 5 to 10 seconds to see an SSIDs pop up to make sure that I
didn't just accidentally toggle it off.

Though, other than that, I've never had wireless problems on this
laptop; never had to even think about looking up how to configure it
cause it's always Just Worked out of the box (02:04.0 Network
controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG [Calexico2] Network
Connection (rev 05))

On the Dell LatD620 and 630s at work, the wireless disabling switch is
rather hard to move and snaps in place (and has a temporary position
that works, even if the laptop is powered off, as an access point
detector) and the switch can actually be disabled in the BIOS for
total assurance that some student won't accidentally flip it.

Interestingly, though not of practical use to use, if you use the
onboard cellular modem (has a SIM card slot), you can tell the BIOS to
assign this switch to control the cell modem antenna rather than the
wifi antenna.

> -a
-s

P.S. FWIW, I also had horrid problems trying to get ndiswrapper to
work when I worked at North; I ended up getting confused and
frustrated and reinstalling/reimaging and starting from scratch more
than once. But I did get it working eventually...just the indicator
LEDs didn't do anything.

I haven't had a wireless network card driver issue since...Intrepid
Ibex? When I plugged a live CD into a neighbor's laptop, whose wifi
did not work in Hardy and took me a long time to figure out, and it
Just Worked.
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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
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>
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