Wireless issues with broadcom... "Network down"

I have a laptop with a broadcom wireless chip in it (BCM43111) and have gone through the posted sticky several times (and many before on my old kubuntu setup haha). Supposedly my card is being recognized as a wireless card, but I cannot scan for any wireless networks (or connect). It simply says:

this interface does not support scanning : interface down.

I have tried the fix posted on the sticky for the radio issue, and I did change the file, but it did not seem to remedy the solution.

I understand wireless stuff is a real pain to fix (especially with ndiswrapper and such), but if anybody would mind sparing me some time and helping me work through this, it’d really help me out. I’ve tried everything I can think of and think I might have done more harm than good. I have tried using both the knetwork manager and configuring it manually with wpasupplicant but neither seems to be allowing scanning. I will post a couple outputs below but please let me know anything I can supply to be of any help.

Overall, the driver seems to be installed and working correctly, but I believe I am configuring it completely wrong (have a WPA-PSK network).

iwconfig:
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wmaster0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:“linksys”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

pan0 no wireless extensions.

related lines of lspci:
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

…Thanks in advance for taking the time to help me out. I look forward to being an active member in the openSUSE community.

facepalm

…So after digging through the forums I found that all I had to do was run a pre-installed firmware. No need for ndiswrapper or anything anymore.

Life is good. False alarm. lol!

Heide264 wrote:
> facepalm
>
> …So after digging through the forums I found that all I had to do was
> run a pre-installed firmware. No need for ndiswrapper or anything
> anymore.

Just for accuracy, what you ran was a pre-installed script that
downloaded some Broadcom driver files for other systems, extracted the
firmware, and placed those firmware files in the proper directory so
that the Linux driver could find them.

Glad you found the solution.

Larry

I have an atheros based usb adapter. When I try to get it going, lsusb says that it is loaded but has the warning (?) (no firmware).

Now it doesn’t say I need firmware, it just says no firmware. In another forum, from 2+ years ago, it says to load the athwmdwl.sys as an ndiswrapper driver and then the real driver.

I jumped in here because my adapter is acting exactly like the broadcom.

Prexy wrote:
> I have an atheros based usb adapter. When I try to get it going, lsusb
> says that it is loaded but has the warning (?) (no firmware).
>
> Now it doesn’t say I need firmware, it just says no firmware. In
> another forum, from 2+ years ago, it says to load the athwmdwl.sys as an
> ndiswrapper driver and then the real driver.
>
> I jumped in here because my adapter is acting exactly like the
> broadcom.

If you look at the output from the dmesg command, that should say what
firmware file the driver wants to load. After you know the name, use
Google to locate it on the web, download it and “sudo cp” that file to
/lib/firmware.

Larry

Thanks larry.

Given the current state of the machine, that will be an all day affair. I’ll post my results.

Where did you find that mate?

I’ve just been wrestling with the exact same thing and was about post on it when I saw this thread

Although my output in dmesg | less suggests that it already has the firmware and loaded the driver, it has to be worth a try

There’s another thread on pretty much the same thing where lwfinger suggests running this command:

sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware

Worked a treat for me, after doing this the card was easily configurable using Yast or iwconfig

You do need to be connected to the net when you do it though