Broadcom bcm43xx.ko

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 21 April 2006 22:49, David G. Miller wrote:
>Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
>>Greetings;
>>
>>Getting curious (yeah I know, it finally killed that famous cat for
>> the 9th time)  I was wandering around in the lib/modules tree after
>> the 2096 kernel had been installed, and low, and behold even, there
>> sits a driver module for the bcm43xx broadcom chips.  Its in:
>>
>>/lib/modules/2.6.16-1.2096_FC5/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/bcm43xx/bc
>>m43xx.ko
>>
>>Ok, fireing off the network settings utility in kde, I was going to
>> try and setup a new network port as eth1, but I find that the only
>> driver listed with a broadcom name in it is for the 'tigon',
>> whatever that might be.
>>
>>Now, I'd like to get rid of the ndiswrapper stuff on general
>> principles, so where, and how, can I make the above driver available
>> for linux to use?  What contains the list of drivers thats available
>> for this utility, and which I might be able to add this driver too?
>>
>>I might add that I have the system-config-network screen open and
>>displaying the list of available drivers, but a perusal of the output
>>of lsof -c system-config-ne isn't showing me any likely candidates.
>>
>>Thanks for any clues.
>
>All I can come up with is a link to the development web site:
>http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ and lots of posts from people having
> trouble making it work.  Sounds like the README may have some
> detailed instructions involving the Windows firmware.  You may need
> to pull down the source just to get the instructions.
>
>Too bad you didn't post a week or do ago.  I'm going to be needing a
>working laptop for the next several days so I'm a little reluctant to
>play with this at the moment.  Hopefully will have the laptop (and me)
>available for experiments in a week or so.
>
>Cheers,
>Dave

Yes, I found that link and bookmarked it on the lappy so when I get 
there, and have time to breath, I may see if I can get lucky.  In the 
meantime I appear to have ndiswrapper working fairly well.  I note the 
real winderz driver is about 2x that ones size, so I'm wondering if its 
all there yet.  OTOH, this does tend to look like a 
system-config-network problem, so I'll keep doing updates on a daily 
basis to see if it gets fixed in the future.

I have to comment about FC5 in general here.  I almost swore off & went 
to debian after the unmitigated disaster FC4 was as I was never able to 
get it to run long enough after the install to actually do a 'yum 
update' even when I'd set /etc/inittab to boot to runlevel 3.  In 
comparison, FC5 has been, with one exception, a block of marble, the 
one exception being eggcups, which blew up and printed 3 copies of a 7 
page web page before I used the web interface on the printers host 
machine to kill the job.

But TBF, at the instant it happened, yum was updating about 29 packages 
and may have touched something as it was running.  I sent the requested 
report in, but haven't heard about it further.

I finally did get switchdesk installed and ran it, and now I have a 
genuine kde interface so I'm much more comfortable with that.  Now if I 
could just toss ndiswrapper and actually use the bcm43xx.ko driver with 
wlan0. I've got a link for that at berlios.de that may help, but having 
read that, I'm more inclined to think its a system-config-network 
problem NOW.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.