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wireless in debian


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I had wireless working in Debian and then suddenly it stopped. I even tried reinstalling to no luck. I tried the native linux driver following the Debian Etch installation guide but couldn't not get wireless working. After googling for days (literally) I have discovered the following. The native drivers will sometimes not work because there is a conflict with udev. Switching to ndiswrapper didn't help either. I blacklisted my bcm43xx drivers and even did rmmod bcm43xx but when I do ndiswrapper -l it shows my windows driver plus the native bcm43xx driver as an alternative. Everything I've read says that if they both show up there's a conflict and it won't work. Even after blacklisting the driver and doing rmmod still no luck, the native driver still shows up. I really like debian a lot and am thinking about installing it on my desktop but I need wireless to work on my lappy. I posted on the Debian forum but so far nothing has worked. I have found out through my googling that Mepis seems to have a lot of luck with this card but after reading the earlier post I don't know if I want to go that route.

 

Any suggestions guys? I'm braindead at this point!

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Have you tried

 ndiswrapper -e bcm43xx

That should remove your native driver from the ndiswrapper list of installed drivers as I understand things. I played around with ndiswrapper quite a lot when I first started with linux and debian quite some time ago and had to do everything by command line.

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debian:/home/mystified# ndiswrapper -e bcm43xx
couldn't delete /etc/ndiswrapper/bcm43xx

 

The only thing under /etc/ndiswrapper is my windows driver.

 

ndiswrapper is all done by command line in Debian. As are a lot of things. Thanks for the suggestion!

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I had wireless working in Debian and then suddenly it stopped. I even tried reinstalling to no luck. I tried the native linux driver following the Debian Etch installation guide but couldn't not get wireless working. After googling for days (literally) I have discovered the following. The native drivers will sometimes not work because there is a conflict with udev.

It's not really a conflict, but more of a confusion as to where the driver looks for the firmware. This is corrected when you copy your firmware to /lib/hotplug/firmware.

 

I'm still thinking about your problems with this using Mandriva... which leads me to believe it's not a Debian specific problem, and I've read your Debian forum posts.

 

So with whatever driver you decide to try... do you have any other devices using your router at this time?

 

I would suggest changing your router's channel, maybe the problem is there... I noticed you didn't have a hardware address. Check for a Hwaddr with

ifconfig -a

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I did copy everything into /lib/hotplug/firmware. I do have my desktop plugged directly into my router.

 

ebian:/home/mystified# ifconfig -a
eth0	  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:36:15:F1:0E
	  inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
	  inet6 addr: fe80::216:36ff:fe15:f10e/64 Scope:Link
	  UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
	  RX packets:2758 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
	  TX packets:2733 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
	  collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
	  RX bytes:2442734 (2.3 MiB)  TX bytes:717825 (701.0 KiB)
	  Interrupt:169 Base address:0x1800

eth1	  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:CE:13:E2:08
	  UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
	  RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
	  TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
	  collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
	  RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
	  Interrupt:217 Memory:e2000000-e2002000

lo		Link encap:Local Loopback
	  inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
	  inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
	  UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
	  RX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
	  TX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
	  collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
	  RX bytes:4020 (3.9 KiB)  TX bytes:4020 (3.9 KiB)

 

It looks like there's a hardware address there.

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It looks like there's a hardware address there.

Yes, you have it there. But you didn't have it in another post at Debian.

My wireless is set to channel 11

 

When I go under network tools for eth1 it shows interface information hardware address not available

It appears that your doing this from another box, ssh maybe? I know it's hard but can you disable the Ethernet and try the wireless, they don't always work well together using Debian Etch.

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