mystified Posted April 7, 2007 Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted April 7, 2007 Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mystified Posted April 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted April 7, 2007 Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 Sorry I thought bcm43xx was your native driver. Is it your native driver you want to get rid of or your windows driver? What is the name of windows driver and what is your native driver called please? Which one are you wanting to use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mystified Posted April 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 My windows driver is bcmlw5.inf. The native driver is bcm43xx. I need to get rid of the native driver which blacklisting it and doing rmmod should have taken care of. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted April 7, 2007 Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 I understand now, sorry but I'm getting on a bit and somewhat slow. Will now post the contents of /etc/ndiswrapper Just the filenames. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted April 7, 2007 Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mystified Posted April 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted April 7, 2007 Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mystified Posted April 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2007 No, I've got the lappy plugged in with a cable. I did deactive eth0 and disconnect the cable and try and no such luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mystified Posted April 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 Well I don't know how or what I did exactly but so far Debian is working with ndiswrapper. I spent a lot of time on this problem! Next time I'll be sure to get a supported card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 Congrats! I know you've spent a lot of time on it. Have you tried encryption yet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mystified Posted April 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 Not yet. I'll try that a little later. I'm so glad I got it working I don't want to mess with anything! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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