Followed "Getting your wireless to work" w/o success

English Network/Internet
#1

All,

I’m brand new to Linux (only installed it 2 days ago) and I’m having trouble to get my wireless to work. I worked through this great post (simple enough even I understood what to do) and I’m stuck at the end of section IV where it says “If you get this output (plus data for other AP’s), then the interface is able to receive data (at least). Other results should be posted.”. So here are my “other results”:

First I checked if the card was available in the H/W config (YaST2 -> Hardware -> Hardware Information -> Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card):
*Kernel-Driver: ssb
37: PCI c00.0: 0280 Network controller

  • [Created at pci.328]
  • Unique ID: zb5c.AUabv0M9SM3
    Parent ID: qTvu.ovLjGPjlVv9
    SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:0c:00.0
    SysFS BusID: 0000:0c:00.0
    Hardware Class: network
    Model: “Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card”
    Vendor: pci 0x14e4 “Broadcom”
    Device: pci 0x4311 “BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN”
    SubVendor: pci 0x1028 “Dell”
    SubDevice: pci 0x0007 “Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card”
    Revision: 0x01
    Driver: “b43-pci-bridge”
    Driver Modules: “ssb”
    Memory Range: 0xf9ffc000-0xf9ffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
    IRQ: 17 (119843 events)
    Module Alias: “pci:v000014E4d00004311sv00001028sd00000007bc02sc80i00”
    Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: ssb is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: “modprobe ssb”
    Config Status: cfg=no, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
    Attached to: #20 (PCI bridge)*

Then I used the konsole to check the firmware
*~> dmesg | grep firmware
12.893433] b43-phy0 ERROR: Please open a terminal and enter the command “sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware” to download the correct firmware for this driver version. For an off-line installation, go to http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_(Wireless)/Broadcom_BCM43xx and follow the instructions in the “Installing firmware from RPM packages” section.
*
So I did as instructed:
~> sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware
*…
b43 firmware successfully installed.
b43legacy firmware successfully installed.
*
This looked promising so I scanned the network:
*~> sudo /usr/sbin/iwlist scan
eth0 Interface doesn’t support scanning.
lo Interface doesn’t support scanning.
*
This was a little irritating so I went back and check the firmware once more:
*~> dmesg | grep firmware
12.893433] b43-phy0 ERROR: Please open a terminal and enter the command “sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware” to download the correct firmware for this driver version. For an off-line installation, go to http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_(Wireless)/Broadcom_BCM43xx and follow the instructions in the “Installing firmware from RPM packages” section.
*

What am I missing?

Cheers
Mark

#2

The required firmware.

As you apparently did successfully install it: did you reboot afterwards?
It is only loaded during boot.

The other option would be to use the proprietary broadcom-wl driver that’s available from Packman (you need to install the packages broadcom-wl and broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop).
But if the included open source driver works fine (and it should), it’s probably the better choice (less problematic…).

#3

Thanks, that was it. I was told Linux does not need reboots and there are ideas for being able to even replace the kernel w/o having to reboot so this did not cross my mind.
Thanks again,
Mark

#4

Well, strictly speaking you probably wouldn’t have had to reboot.
Reloading the kernel module (“driver”) should have helped too.

But sometimes it’s easier to just reboot… :wink: