OpenSUSE 11.0 + BCM4310 finally working but . . .

… . . now it isn’t!

Yesterday, I finally got it working using ndiswrapper+bcmwl5.inf and
NetworkManager. Actually worked better than 10.3 as it worked without a
reboot being necessary. Should have known it was too good to last. Today, I
can’t get a connection.

I’ve tried various re-configurations, including reverting to iup and
disabling the ethernet connection. I thought this had worked when, on
reboot, I saw from the messages that the BCM4310 was OK but it then
rebooted! Several more reboots and more failures at various stages in the
device setup - DHCP or microcode - and on the odd occasion when it’s
successful it reboots again!

I have an HP530 and got the bcmwl5 firmware from HP - the XP version as
Vista versions don’t work with ndiswrapper.

Any idea what I can try next?


Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman, not newsboy.

have a read through this
post, migh help especially page 3

Andy

Graham P Davis wrote:
> . . . now it isn’t!
>
> Yesterday, I finally got it working using ndiswrapper+bcmwl5.inf and
> NetworkManager. Actually worked better than 10.3 as it worked without a
> reboot being necessary. Should have known it was too good to last. Today, I
> can’t get a connection.
>
> I’ve tried various re-configurations, including reverting to iup and
> disabling the ethernet connection. I thought this had worked when, on
> reboot, I saw from the messages that the BCM4310 was OK but it then
> rebooted! Several more reboots and more failures at various stages in the
> device setup - DHCP or microcode - and on the odd occasion when it’s
> successful it reboots again!
>
> I have an HP530 and got the bcmwl5 firmware from HP - the XP version as
> Vista versions don’t work with ndiswrapper.
>
> Any idea what I can try next?

Welcome to the Linux equivalent of “Blue Screens of Death” while
running the Windows driver with ndiswrapper. Unfortunately, I don’t
have much to offer you. Broadcom does a really lousy job of error
checking in their drivers, which is why you are getting the crashes. I
know this because I’m currently working on the reverse engineering for
the BCM4310.

At the moment, roughly 1/3 of the routines needed to make the BCM4310
and BCM4328 interfaces work have been translated. Once that is done,
we will write the specifications for the LP and N PHYs and post them
at http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net/. Finally, the code-writing part of
the team will prepare the Linux driver. This is an involved process,
but it works - just takes a long time.

Larry