Arch Linux

mot.def

Member

Registered: 2011-07-03

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

Having some problems connecting up wirelessly using a DW1510 wireless card (based off the Broadcom BCM4322 chip). I've got access to an ethernet port, so I set up XFCE and wicd using pacman. However, wicd couldn't find any wireless networks - apparently b43 doesn't play nice with this particular chipset, so I took a look around and found that others use the broadcom-wl. I followed the Arch wiki's guide on setting it up, and got a kernel panic, so I rebooted and uninstalled it.

I couldn't find any other way to get the wireless card to work, so I tried to reinstall broadcom-wl, but got this:

broadcom-wl 5.100.82.111-1
( Unsupported package: Potentially dangerous ! )
==> Edit PKGBUILD ? [Y/n] ("A" to abort)
==> ------------------------------------
==> n

==> broadcom-wl dependencies:
- linux (already installed)
- linux-headers (already installed)

==> Edit install ? [Y/n] ("A" to abort)
==> -----------------------------------
==> n

==> Continue building broadcom-wl ? [Y/n]
==> -------------------------------------
==>
==> Building and installing package
==> Making package: broadcom-wl 5.100.82.111-1 (Sat Oct 22 16:44:38 BST 2011)
==> Checking runtime dependencies...
==> Checking buildtime dependencies...
==> Retrieving Sources...
  -> Downloading hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_111.tar.gz...
--2011-10-22 16:44:38--  http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/ … 111.tar.gz
Resolving www.broadcom.com... 63.251.216.155
Connecting to www.broadcom.com|63.251.216.155|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1407430 (1.3M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: `hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_111.tar.gz.part'

100%[======================================>] 1,407,430    573K/s   in 2.4s   

2011-10-22 16:44:41 (573 KB/s) - `hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_111.tar.gz.part' saved [1407430/1407430]

  -> Found modprobe.d
  -> Found license.patch
  -> Found semaphore.patch
==> Validating source files with sha1sums...
    hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_111.tar.gz ... Passed
    modprobe.d ... Passed
    license.patch ... Passed
    semaphore.patch ... Passed
==> Extracting Sources...
  -> Extracting hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_111.tar.gz with bsdtar
==> Starting build()...
patching file src/wl/sys/wl_linux.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 245 (offset 5 lines).
patching file src/wl/sys/wl_iw.h
make: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-3.0-ARCH'
make: *** No targets.  Stop.
make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-3.0-ARCH'
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
    Aborting...
==> ERROR: Makepkg was unable to build broadcom-wl.
==> Restart building broadcom-wl ? [y/N]
==> ------------------------------------
==>

So, I looked around to see if yaourt had left anything behind:

[motdef@titan ~]$ rmmod wl
ERROR: Module wl does not exist in /proc/modules
[motdef@titan ~]$ modprobe wl
FATAL: Could not read '/lib/modules/3.0-ARCH/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/wl.ko': No such file or directory
[motdef@titan ~]$ sudo modprobe -r wl
Password:
[motdef@titan ~]$ modprobe wl
FATAL: Error inserting wl (/lib/modules/3.0-ARCH/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/wl.ko): Operation not permitted

Apparently modprobe thinks it exists even though the related files don't. I tried rebooting, and now I'm getting errors there, too (sorry about the crude photograph, I couldn't work out how to send the errors to a file):

As I said earlier, b43 isn't compatible with my chipset anyway, so it's not a huge problem, but irritating nevertheless.

I'm really stuck for ideas. I'm not sure if the broadcom-wl package files are actually on my system or not, and I've no idea what's missing from the kernel folder, and what it's got to do with the b43 errors at startup. Any suggestions?

Last edited by mot.def (2011-10-28 11:26:03)

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: [SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

The wl driver doesn't need external firmware, those messages aren't from wl. My guess is they're from b43, which means you haven't blacklisted it.

Oh, and b43 does support those cards. Functionality with N networks is a bit limited, but if you configure your router correctly (2.4GHz frequency and a 20MHz channel), or if you use G, then the b43 driver will work.

mot.def

Member

Registered: 2011-07-03

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

I had b43 and ssb blacklisted, as the wiki suggested.

I just reinstalled Arch from scratch and set up broadcom-wl again. Got another kernel panic after doing "sudo modprobe wl" (and got a picture), and after that I started getting the familiar modprobe and yaourt error messages.

I'll start again and try using b43, though I did try it on my very first attempt and it definitely didn't want to work with the wireless card.

BabyDoc

Member

Registered: 2008-03-20

Posts: 76

Re: [SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

I had b43 and ssb blacklisted, as the wiki suggested.

I just reinstalled Arch from scratch and set up broadcom-wl again. Got another kernel panic after doing "sudo modprobe wl" (and got a picture), and after that I started getting the familiar modprobe and yaourt error messages.

I'll start again and try using b43, though I did try it on my very first attempt and it definitely didn't want to work with the wireless card.

I had the same kernel panic after updating the broadcom-wl driver today. I removed the driver and am now using brcmsmac which is part of the kernel. Maybe you can check that out if its compatible with your card. (See the wiki for more details.)

mot.def

Member

Registered: 2011-07-03

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

No luck with brcmsmac. I also tried ndiswrapper, but it refused to load the .inf from the Windows driver.

b43 is the only driver so far that actually lists wlan0 when I do iwconfig, but I can't get the card to return any networks with it.

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: [SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

b43 is the only driver so far that actually lists wlan0 when I do iwconfig, but I can't get the card to return any networks with it.

Did you install the firmware? The easiest way is the b43-firmware package from AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=21690

mot.def

Member

Registered: 2011-07-03

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] DW1510, broadcom-wl and wicd

Argh, can't believe I overlooked that - for some reason I thought that the b43 firmware was included with the kernel and that the start-up errors I was having was caused by broadcom-wl messing up. Thanks very much!