How to get Broadcom mini PCI wireless working in Puppy 4

[smog]

Now I have my centrino laptop working with wireless in puppy 4 I am trying to get my HP laptop with broadcom wireless card going.

Absolutely no luck so far either with ndiswrapper or b43 modules.

I had to use b43-fwcutter to get it going in Ubuntu, can I use this somehow in Puppy 4? Ubuntu did everything automatically so I'm not even sure how this works.

If I can get this working too I will document both in the proposed wireless database by can8v which looks like a god idea.

Thanks

smog

[mark2]

Puppy 4 , both kernel flavours, has had problems seeing pcmcia cards.

I found the fix for my bcm43xx.

see http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=28795 for further details it may be the problem you are experiencing.

There's a fix on page 2 if necessary.

[smog]

It is not pcmcia it is an internal mini pci card, will this be a different issue?

[nipper]

It is not pcmcia it is an internal mini pci card, will this be a different issue?

Probably, somewhat different.

You could enter lspci -v into a terminal and get a listing of your pci devices, that could help to identify which Broadcom chipset.

I haven't tried it with Dingo yet but for 3.01 I did have to install the Broadcom firmware .pet so the Broadcom module could work. (What you did in Ubuntu with fwcutter is extract the firmware.)

You could enter lsmod in a terminal to see the loaded modules. There is likely a Broadcom one loaded.

Mine is the older Broadcom chipset and it works, I haven't tried with newer versions of the chipset or as I stated with Puppy4 yet. However, someone here probably has and can assist you once you've identified the necessary information.

[tempestuous]

smog,
The b43 module seems to be problematic.
The 2.6.25.4 kernel that Barry is preparing for Puppy 4.01 might improve the situation, but in the meantime it might help to troubleshoot by reporting your dmesg output.
Barry has already included the necessary firmware ... although there's a chance that a slightly different firmware is required. dmesg will help determine this.

[mac84]

I have a broadcom 4318 mini pci. and the only way for me to set it up is no encryption and scripts. I got it to connect with wep but it would drop so often that it was useless. and DHCP for the most part timed out. I was excited to just have my laptop up and going again so I never really looked deeper then that, although I should.

this script is nothing special but it works for me. I have my wireless set up with mac address filters, no encryption, and static IP add.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
 clear
rmmod bcm43xx
sleep 2 &&modprobe bcm43xx
echo "Bcm43xx Module Reloaded"
ifconfig eth1 up
echo "Broadcom radio on"
iwlist eth1 scan
iwconfig eth1 mode managed key off
iwconfig eth1 essid "DaLoveMachein"
ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255 up
route add -net default gw 192.168.1.1
echo nameserver 192.168.1.1  >>  /etc/resolve.conf

[smog]

I have tried lsmod, lspci -v and dmesg but I don't know how to get the outputs copied out of the terminal into the forum post......

[tempestuous]

Code: Select all

cd /root
dmesg > dmesg.txt
gzip dmesg.txt
lspci -v > lspci.txt
gzip lspci.txt

Now attach dmesg.txt.gz and lspci.txt.gz to the forum.

[smog]

Here we are, thanks Tempestuous

[tempestuous]

Well Puppy detects your device OK - it's "0280: 14e4:4320" which appears to be a modern variant of the Broadcom BCM4306 chipset.

But Puppy does not appear to automatically load a module for this device. I need you to load the b43 module -

Code: Select all

modprobe b43

then give me dmesg.

It might also be worth loading the old bcm43xx module (unload the b43 module first) then give me the dmesg from this.
It might also be worth tryingh the "b43legacy" module.

In all cases when trying to connect to a wifi access point, disable encryption. We don't want encryption problems confusing the issue.

[smog]

OK Tempestuous you've done it yet again. I am typing this on my WEP secured wireless connection on my broadcom connection.

As soon as I did

modprobe b43legacy

I got wlan0 reported with iwconfig so I simply ran my old script to set up the essid and WEP security and I was in straight away.

Thank you so much again

smog

[tempestuous]

So everyone can understand the situation, it appears that Broadcom wifi devices are supported by 2 different drivers in Puppy4 - b43 and b43legacy. Since the correct one is not necessarily automatically loaded, you must use trial and error.

To complicate matters further, Puppy4 also contains the deprecated bcm43xx driver.