Havin_it Posted August 11, 2004 Report Share Posted August 11, 2004 Our old friend wireless net returns. I really have tried to make things work with the previous threads, but no results whatsoever. I don't use my card for home networking, purely for hotspot internet access (I have a good free one near me). The card's chipset is Broadcom 94306. I have ndiswrapper 0.91 installed - although bizarrely the command dmesg | grep ndiswrapper returns 'ndiswrapper 0.4 loaded' even though 0.91 is the first version I've installed. I have installed my WinXP CD's drivers plus drivers 2, 3 and 4 from the ndiswrapper site's compatibility list page, all are recognised though one is 'fuzzy'. The card itself has the LEDs very faintly illuminated, modprobe ndiswrapper makes no change to them. lsmod shows ndiswrapper as a module, but not used by anything. pcmcia_core is used by ds and yenta_socket, whatever those are. cardctl ident shows only Socket 0: no product info available [i only have one PCMCIA slot and the card is in there] iwconfig shows 'no wireless extensions' with all of my existing network devices (eth0, lo, ppp0, sit0). lspci gives this: 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94306 802.11g (rev 03) Other observations: there is nothing about my card in /etc/pcmcia/config and I can't get the correct info to make an entry for it (as cardctl doesn't give me those hex codes as in the FAQ). Also there are three 'bcmxxx' cards listed when I go into MCC's 'configure a wireless connection' wizard, but none matching my chipset. I thought about just selecting one of them randomly, but my experiences with the Speedtouch modem cautioned me against doing things blindly in the GUI. I gather some here have made this work, but exactly how is not really revealed in anything I've read here. Most threads on the subject seem to have petered out, or ended with "Hey, it's working now! Bye then..." so not exactly helpful to me. Can anyone help? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 11, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 11, 2004 (edited) Just to be clear, the card does appear in Harddrake as well, but the problem still remains that ndiswrapper is not being offered as a driver (I think that's what should happen). Here's what is displayed next to the card in Harddrake: Vendor: Broadcom Corporation Bus: PCI Bus identification: 14e4:4320:1799:7010 Location on the bus: 3:0:0 Description: BCM94306 802.11g NIC Module: unknown Media class: NETWORK_OTHER Is there something in modprobe.conf or modules.conf that I should be adding? Can I do anything useful at all with the information I've presented? AFTERTHOUGHT: very quiet in here. Maybe I should have posted in networking? I will make a link over there, or maybe a mod can move it for me. I'm still unsure which forum is better for this one. Edited August 12, 2004 by Havin_it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 Another thought: I came across a Fedora-related page on ndiswrapper which talked about having to manually create the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 I have ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-lo files, so I guess I should have a similar one for wlan0, but I don't know what should be in there. Is this file needed for a setup of this type (using ndiswrapper)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted August 12, 2004 Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 Havin it - I have moved this topic to Networking and deleted the link you set up. As you suggested, that is bad form :o and probably unnecessary as most members use the 'view new posts' facility. Try to be patient - some of our experts aren't here every day. If you've had no response after a couple of days, just post briefly in the same thread to get back to the top of the heap. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 Sorry & thanks for the tidyup job. Think I will take a day off from this problem as it's really baking my noodle (could you tell?) Just one other consideration: most of my testing has been done at home, away fromthe hotspot, as I didn't even seem to have the hardware issues resolved yet. I've assumed that I could still bring up the device wlan0 without an available network - true? (It seems true of my eth0 card which is not plugged into anything). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
afrosheen Posted August 12, 2004 Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 Pay close attention here, it gets deep but you should be able to handle it. Ndiswrapper comes preinstalled on Mandrake10 but the version is so old to be completely useless. First thing you need to do is uninstall it (urpme ndiswrapper), second thing is get rid of what it leaves behind. A fun little turd that will kill any new ndiswrapper you add is in /lib/modules/modules.dep. Yes, you will need to open that file with kwrite or vi (as root), find the line that shows the path to ndiswrapper, and delete it. Save the file and THEN you can start using the new ndiswrapper. This is mentioned in the INSTALL and README documents that come with ndiswrapper. The problem with the path in modules.dep is that it points to the old driver and therefore dmesg will always show you that version .4 got loaded. If you follow these instructions, next time you modprobe ndiswrapper, dmesg should give you alot of info. Good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 (edited) AAAAH thanks! It's so good to have a reply! I did not realise there would STILL be a trace of ndiswrapper 0.4, as RPMdrake listed 0.41 as an addable package. However, I'm pretty sure my RPMdrake has bugz up the yinyang anyway... Okay, I will sort out modules.dep and try to start with a clean slate. Since my last post, I've tried removing the 0.9 RPM and installing the same version from source. The upshot of this was the dreaded freeze on modprobe ndiswrapper. I'm not expecting RPMdrake to be any great help with removing this, so I will just go and delete everything I know of and start over. This won't involve recompiling my kernel will it? I've never done that, though I guess I could if I had to... For further info I'm now on kernel 2.6.3-15 Thanks again for weighing in, I will report back soon. NEW: deleted everything, including TWO lines in modules.dep, installed ndiswrapper0.9 from RPM, now modprobe doesn't find ndiswrapper! Will try again, building from source. Edited August 12, 2004 by Havin_it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 So I tried with the source, and there's good news and bad news... BAD: total freeze on modprobe ndiswrapper, like before. GOOD: THE POWER LED WENT GREEN! BRIGHT EFFIN GREEN! I think we're definitely getting somewhere here. I do recall something about this in ndiswrapper's FAQ pages, so I'll look into this and come back. <so excited!> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 13, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 13, 2004 (edited) Wondering if I'd misinterpreted afrosheen's advice, I went further and deleted the actual files that were mentioned in modules.dep as well, namely /lib/modules/2.6.3-15mdk/misc/ndiswrapper.ko /lib/modules/2.6.3-15mdk/kernel/3rdparty/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper.ko.gz After reinstalling the 0.9 source package (and rebooting to ensure I had not totally borked the kernel), I checked the kernel-source changes and found that ndiswrapper.ko had returned, as had its reference on the first line of modules.dep, but ndiswrapper.ko.gz had not (nor had its path reference). The result of modprobe ndiswrapper: same. Instant freeze. afrosheen (or anyone else who has a working setup) can you report on the presence/absence of these lines and their corresponding files? I've no idea what is the difference between the two, so I'm pretty much in the dark here. Here's the last bit of syslog before the crash: Aug 13 14:29:19 localhost pci.agent[3080]: ... no modules for PCI slot 0000:03:00.0 Aug 13 14:29:57 localhost kernel: ndiswrapper: no version for "struct_module" found: kernel tainted. Aug 13 14:29:57 localhost kernel: ndiswrapper version 0.9 loaded Aug 13 14:29:57 localhost kernel: ndiswrapper: driver bcmwl5.sys added Aug 13 14:29:58 localhost kernel: PCI: Enabling device 0000:03:00.0 (0000 -> 0002) Aug 13 14:29:58 localhost kernel: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:03:00.0 to 64 Aug 13 14:29:58 localhost kernel: ndiswrapper: using irq 16 Aug 13 14:29:58 localhost kernel: ndiswrapper (wrap_spin_lock:271): lock d5c47a60 is already locked Aug 13 14:29:58 localhost kernel: ndiswrapper (wrap_spin_unlock:293): lock d5c47a60 was not locked Aug 13 14:29:58 localhost kernel: bad: scheduling while atomic! Aug 13 14:31:51 localhost syslogd 1.4.1: restart. Edited August 13, 2004 by Havin_it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted August 13, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 13, 2004 (edited) Well, I will be darned. Found another post on here (recent) suggesting the simple item: Don't insert the card until after modprobing! And sure enough, I have wlan0 up and running. Now need to get to hotspot for final analysis.... EDIT: Hello from the pub! @ : thanks for breaking the deadlock when I had truly run out of ideas (and hope, nearly)... props The HowTo is coming. EDIT(2): The HowTo is not coming because I can't post a HowTo in the FAQ section. I will be happy to post a ndiswrapper howto if someone advises me howto do that! Edited August 13, 2004 by Havin_it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest gary1234 Posted January 22, 2005 Report Share Posted January 22, 2005 I have the same driver need in my Dell insiron 9100 .[bCM94306 802.11g NIC Is there aplace to get the right driver Dell is no help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Havin_it Posted January 26, 2005 Author Report Share Posted January 26, 2005 There is a driver from Dell listed in the ndiswrapper Wiki for this card. http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R76521na.EXE This is a self-extracting archive + installer. Unpack in Windows (I guess maybe you could open it with Ark or something in Linux but haven't tried), then cancel the installer. I'm currently using the driver from the 'IR' folder (bcmwl5a.inf) with Knoppix, because the one from the Belkin CD doesn't seem to work with that distro. Hope this helps some. You should check the Wiki for other alternative drivers if this one doesn't work, link here: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/List? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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