[lwfinger]

benoix wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a laptop hp pavilion dv6110ca with bcm4311 wireless card. Three
> weeks ago it stopped working. I guess it’s dead because it doesn’t show
> up neither in windows nor in linux. It was the second time so I decided
> to buy d-link dwa-140 usb wireless adapter.
> I’ve read the thread Getting Your Wireless to Work and did everything
> according to that threat. In YaST => Hardware => Hardware Information I
> see my usb wireless adapter and Kernel Driver is rt2870. When I checked
> /var/log/boot.msg I didn’t find any line with the word "firmware", but I
> found these lines:
>
>> rt2870sta: module is from the staging directory, the quality is unknown,
>> you have been warned.
>> usbcore: registered new interface driver rt2870
>> Error: Driver 'rt2870' is already registered, aborting...
>> usbcore: error -17 registering interface driver rt2870
>
> Can that be a problem that I can’t get my wireless adapter connected?
> I can see a lot of Access Points in my vicinity, but I can’t connect to
> any of them (some of them are open).
> Thanks

There were a number of HP laptops with problems in the BIOS that
caused overheating of the motherboard and failure of the PCI-E
interface. I had one of them, which was replaced by HP. I don't know
how long the warranty situation existed, but you should check with HP
support giving model and serial number.

You made an unlucky choice of a USB stick. Any driver that comes from
staging is a vendor written driver. No Linux developer will devote
much time to sorting out that kind of problem.

To show you how bad such drivers are, error -17 means that the driver
is trying to create a file that already exists! That error is
certainly killing your device. If you are lucky, ndiswrapper with the
Windows driver might work.