broadcom wlan card problem

[seandiggity]

I'm having trouble with a Broadcom BCM4306 wireless PCI card. I installed ndiswrapper and followed the instructions at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...p/Installation

ndiswrapper tells me I have the correct driver (the frontend ndisgtk also tells me so). The ndiswrapper module also appears to load correctly. But when I run iwconfig, I get:

eth2      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"NETGEAR"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Invalid   Bit Rate=1 Mb/s
          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

iwlist also doesn't work. When I try to bring the interface eth2 up with ifconfig, I get this error:

SIOCSIFFLAGS: Permission denied

...which is the same error I get when I run /etc/init.d/networking restart

I know the card works because it installs fine on a Windows box. I'm not sure what the deal is, and I've been working at this for a few hours now. Any ideas?

[spencerf]

did you do the ifconfig command as root?

[Zelmo]

It's odd that the wireless card is being called eth2; ndiswrapper started naming it wlan0 about two years ago, as I recall. That suggests that either the driver didn't load right, or you have a very old version of ndiswrapper.

What do you get from ifconfig -a, and what lines in dmesg look like they're applicable to the situation (i.e., contain bcm, ndis, wlan, or some other related string)?

[seandiggity]

Yup, I ran the ifconfig command as root.

The interface was being called eth2 because Ubuntu had originally installed it as eth1 with the wrong driver (motorola). Using the Ubuntu "Networking" GUI to "activate" the card didn't do anything. When I installed ndiswrapper with the bcmwl5 Windows driver, the interface suddenly showed up as eth2. After a restart, the interface showed up as eth1 again (but with the correct Broadcom driver). So now it's eth1 using ndiswrapper.

The interface name shouldn't really matter, right? The right driver is loaded and I get the correct info when I run iwconfig.

I'm at work right now but will tell you what dmesg says in a later post. ifconfig -a didn't bring up the interface when it was named either eth1 or eth2.

[seandiggity]

Sorry this took so long. I'm completely stumped at this point...dmesg does say ndiswrapper is loading:

[17179595.816000] ndiswrapper version 1.8 loaded (preempt=yes,smp=no)

I also tried installing the kernel module for the broadcom 4.3 driver, and nothing good came of that:

[17179593.280000] bcm43xx driver
[17179594.984000] bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
[17179594.992000] bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.

Let me know if anybody has any ideas...

...as an added note, I'm having a bit of trouble getting a wireless CF card to work on my Zaurus with OPIE. Unrelated, but it's another wireless frustration to add to the pile...

[Zelmo]

The recently developed kernel module bcm43xx needs the appropriate firmware in order to work. Did you use the fwcutter tool (available from the bcm43xx Web site) with the drivers from your install CD or manufacturer's Web site, or grab one of the versions listed in one of the docs (which I can't seem to find at the moment)? If it's the latter, you may need to try a few different versions before you find a firmware that works right.

Note that the bcm43xx module and ndiswrapper are mutually exclusive--if one is loaded, you can't use the other. So if bcm43xx is hard-compiled into the kernel, ndiswrapper won't work. Conversely, you'll have to make sure ndiswrapper is unloaded if you want to use bcm43xx.

[loft306]

Note that the bcm43xx module and ndiswrapper are mutually exclusive--if one is loaded, you can't use the other. So if bcm43xx is hard-compiled into the kernel, ndiswrapper won't work. Conversely, you'll have to make sure ndiswrapper is unloaded if you want to use bcm43xx.

Also on this note if you buggered your kernel with ndiswrapper and bcm43xx i sugest that you start with new kernel sources and compile a new kernel!... though you can use your existing .config (unless you are going back to ndiswrapper(edit as nessasary))

[seandiggity]

I didn't use fwcutter...I saw the broadcom module in my repository in synaptic and I figured "why not? maybe it'll work". I didn't have high hopes. I'm going to get rid of the bcm43xx module and go with ndiswrapper (I kinda doubt that bcm43xx will work with the card)...if I have to recompile the kernel I will.

Thanks for the work so far, but I may even go with a new wireless card if I can't get ndiswrapper going on the next try...

[aberios]

I'm having trouble with a Broadcom BCM4306 wireless PCI card. I installed ndiswrapper and followed the instructions at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...p/Installation

ndiswrapper tells me I have the correct driver (the frontend ndisgtk also tells me so). The ndiswrapper module also appears to load correctly. But when I run iwconfig, I get:

eth2      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"NETGEAR"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Invalid   Bit Rate=1 Mb/s
          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

iwlist also doesn't work. When I try to bring the interface eth2 up with ifconfig, I get this error:

SIOCSIFFLAGS: Permission denied

...which is the same error I get when I run /etc/init.d/networking restart

I know the card works because it installs fine on a Windows box. I'm not sure what the deal is, and I've been working at this for a few hours now. Any ideas?

I had a similar problem and identical errors when trying to configure my network card. I finally got it to work using the "network-admin" application, but whenever I would reboot, my card would stop working until I reconfigured it. It turned out that the issues I was experiencing were because my network interfaces kept getting swapped (i.e. eth1 would become eth2 and vice versa). I assigned a permanent name using udev, and don't have this problem anymore (see http://felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2006/0...ics-in-linux/).

By the way, I'm using Ubuntu Dapper

Hope this helps

Angelo

[Sam Liu]

or you can just blacklist the old drivers =]