[conspire] Fedora 12 wireless hell

[Tony Godshall]

Gah! That installs their whole driver.

When I did it I just extracted the .fw file and put it in the place
the good open source kernel driver (b43) could find it (/lib/firmware)

What you just did blocked the open source kernel driver and said use
the proprietary driver.

It's bad enough to use a proprietary blob for the firmware- I'd avoid
using a proprietary blob driver since it will break future kernels.

Best Regards.



On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 21:17, Ehud Kaldor <ehud.kaldor at gmail.com> wrote:
> thanks.
> as i mentioned, i found the driver buried in the Broadcom, in the basement
> of the planning office, where both the lights and stairs had been removed,
> in an old
> filing cabinet locked in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying
> “Beware of the Leopard.” here:
> http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
> the readme includes detailed instructions on how to install, which i
> summarized in the following script:
>
> #broadcom wireless driver
> yum install -y gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers wget #needed to build
> mkdir broadcom
> cd broadcom
> wget
> http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5.60.48.36.tar.gz
> tar xvf hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5.60.48.36.tar.gz
> make clean
> make
> rmmod b43
> rmmod ssb
> rmmod wl
> echo "blacklist ssb" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
> echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
> modprobe lib80211
> modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
> insmod wl.ko
> cp wl.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
> depmod -a
> echo modeprobe wl >> /etc/rc.local
> cd ..
> rm -rf broadcom
> rm -f hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5.60.48.36.tar.gz
>
> worked for me (unfortunately, more than once). half my kingdom for whoever
> writes a default package that includes low-level driver for the major arch's
> of wireless out there.
>
> Ehud
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Tony Godshall <tony at of.net> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> [Rick wrote]
>> > And, you know what?  I'm betting that your sole problem is not having
>> > that firmware image, so you may now be in luck.
>> ...
>>
>> [my 2c]
>> If the system identifies the right driver but there's no firmware for
>> it, dmesg should show you a message to that effect.  It did when I had
>> to configure "the dreaded b43".
>> # dmesg|egrep -i 'firmware|b43'
>>
>> Tony
>
>