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#1 2010-03-15 09:10:33

xganesh
Member
Registered: 2010-03-15
Posts: 33

Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

This old laptop is a HP Pavillion ze2000

I'm just starting off with Arch and followed carefully all the installation instructions.

Since in the past the b43 driver did not work for my card, I decided to use ndiswrapper. So I installed the windows drivers and restarted.

After ndiswrapper -l, it says that there is an 'alternative' driver (ssb).

So, on rc.conf, I blacklisted both ssb and b43 by using ! on MODULES.

At this point, neither ssb nor b43 are being started at boot time or later, but ndiswrapper is started at boot.

However, when I try to bring my card up with ifconf wlan0 up, it shows as being active after ifconf, but it cannot see the local access points and is not recognized by wicd.

I'm at a loss here. Please help.

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#2 2010-03-15 09:45:25

csat
Member
From: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Registered: 2008-08-06
Posts: 93

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

My Dell notebook uses also a Broadcom.  It is BCM43xx and works nice using the package available to AUR named broadcom-wl.  If you want to give it a try you should have base-devel package installed too, blacklist some modules and include another to MODULES array at /etc/rc.conf.

If you have already tried this please disregard.

Good luck.


CSAT
Arch User

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#3 2010-03-15 10:23:02

brianhanna
Member
Registered: 2009-10-30
Posts: 157

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

can you post your lspci output?

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#4 2010-03-16 01:22:02

xganesh
Member
Registered: 2010-03-15
Posts: 33

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

Thank you very much for your tips.  I'll definitely look into broadcom-wl and try it.
Now I'm posting the network cards information as shown by lspci :

05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
05:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)

Last edited by xganesh (2010-03-16 01:24:11)

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#5 2010-03-16 02:06:22

csat
Member
From: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Registered: 2008-08-06
Posts: 93

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g


CSAT
Arch User

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#6 2010-03-16 11:31:36

brianhanna
Member
Registered: 2009-10-30
Posts: 157

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

Looks like b43 should work with your card.  If it does, it would be easier to live with since you'd have to recompile broadcom-wl every time you update the kernel.  Here are some links...

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/B43#b43

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#7 2010-03-16 12:28:57

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

xganesh wrote:

Since in the past the b43 driver did not work for my card, I decided to use ndiswrapper.

General advice - don't base your decisions on things that happened in the past. This would apply to pretty much all aspects of everything smile, but in particular to computing with Arch, where things change all the time, usually for the better.

As advised, go with the b43 driver, which is very usable these days.

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#8 2010-03-24 17:22:23

random_traveller
Member
Registered: 2009-11-16
Posts: 3

Re: Wireless card not recognized -> Broadcom 802.11b/g

b43 is what you need to be using, according to this. I have a similar card in my laptop, and I got it working just following the steps in the Arch wiki.

The only kink I ran into was in Step #4; the first wl_apsta.o file I downloaded did not work. I tried another (there are currently several linked there) and everything went fine. It's worth giving a shot if you haven't tried this method in a while.

Last edited by random_traveller (2010-03-24 17:22:47)

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