[SLED on HP Mini] Broadcom Wireless stopped working after Update

English Network/Internet
1

A bit of Background: I’m using a HP Mini 2140 that came with SLED10 preinstalled. Out of the box, Wifi worked fine. After some fiddling, I managed to activate the license thus get online updates working. The proceeding Online Update worked fine, but it seems to have broken something about the Wifi, as it can’t be recognized anymore. (No idea what changed to break it, though. Kernel Update? Anybody know where I can fand find a log of the updates, if that might help?)

Looking through the stickies, here’s what I could find out about my hardware:

(I also tried this with a version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition I booted from an USBstick and it read the Wifi card as a Broadcom 4322.)

What I’ve tried so far:

When booting Ubuntu Netbook Edition (I’m slightly more familiar with Ubuntu while this is my first Suse machine, so I figured I’d try that first.) /sbin/lspci did tell me more then under Suse (It recognized it as a Broadcom 4322.) but at the same time the Ethernet didn’t work, so I had no way to load b43-fwcutter, which seemed to be the way to install and unpack the firmware I’d need.

I also found a site that gave the command " 1 sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware" for opensuse, but this script doesn’t seem to exist in SLED from what I can tell.

What I haven’t tried it getting into ndiswrapper, which looked a bit intimidating, tbh.

So, I hope somebody here can help me with this or at least point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

2

sindraun wrote:
> A bit of Background: I’m using a HP Mini 2140 that came with SLED10
> preinstalled.

SLED is a commercial product…this is the openSUSE forum, you really
need to ask over in forum.novell.com

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DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
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3

Ah, ok, I didn’t think they where that different. (Like I said, first Suse machine.)

I’ll go and ask there, thx.

4

I had the same problem with my 2133 last year. BCM4312 there used closed wl driver and I think that 2140 uses it for 4322. I have not checked this.

You could try modprobe (as root), as after kernel update wl.ko seems not to be installed (into the running kernel)


hro2:~ # iwconfig eth1
eth1      No such device

hro2:~ # modprobe wl
hro2:~ # iwconfig eth1
eth1      IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Managementmode:All packets received

A nice and frienly place to discuss these problems is HP Mini Guide .

Be sure to get your SLED registration to Novell right, because first set of updates was only to install stuff that was not included in the installation partition of the HDD.

5

Digging into my archives I found that the above solution was somewhat unreliable. Sometimes you may have to give

ifconfig eth1 up; dhclient eth1

command as root.

If this solution (modprobing wl) works it can be made permanent by an ugly fix. As root you add a file /etc/init.d/wireless

#!/bin/sh
#
# /etc/init.d/wireless

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          wireless
# Required-Start:    $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $syslog
# Default-Start:     3 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 2 6
# Description:       fires up wireless
### END INIT INFO
. /etc/rc.status
rc_reset
echo -n "setting up wireless, modprobe wl, (hro 2009-04-15)"
/sbin/modprobe wl
rc_status -v
rc_exit
# end of script

and as root give following command

insserv wireless

If you end up installing KDE you may have to use “ifconfig eth1 up” method instead of knetworkmanager to form connection.