CrunchBang Linux

ackernan

#! Junkie

Registered: 2011-01-10

Posts: 403

Broadcom wireless driver

I have a broadcom 4312 wireless card, with #! statler.  My system was working fine with the wl driver, but after using a Dlink DWA-160 wireless card for testing I had to use the b43 driver for wireless to work.  If I used the wl driver, dmesg would recognize my card as 4315 and wireless would not work.  I used the install instructions on http://wiki.debian.org/wl .  It says the 4312 is supported by both drivers, why doesn't the wl driver work now?  Should I mark it as a broadcom thing?

tony@tony-Inspiron-1564:~$ lspci -vnn | grep 14e4
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
tony@tony-Inspiron-1564:~$ dmesg|grep -i broadcom
[   23.967247] eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Hybrid Wireless Controller 5.60.48.36 
[  163.550106] b43-phy0: Broadcom 4312 WLAN found (core revision 15)
[  163.725127] Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PL, Firmware-ID: FW13 ]
tony@tony-Inspiron-1564:~$ 

Last edited by ackernan (2011-06-18 13:18:37)

ackernan

#! Junkie

Registered: 2011-01-10

Posts: 403

Re: Broadcom wireless driver

Any ideas?

mynis01

#! Die Hard

From: 127.0.0.1

Registered: 2010-07-02

Posts: 2,005

Re: Broadcom wireless driver

There's a lot of different things that could be going on here. I have the same card as you, and to get wireless to work I have to install rfkill and issue the command

sudo rfkill unblock all

I'm using the 2.6.38 kernel with the lpphy driver though, so chances are you're having a different issue than I have. Sometimes the same wifi card will behave differently with different motherboards. If that doesn't work, I suppose the first order of business is checking to see if your interface is up. What is the output of

ifconfig wlan0

pvsage

Internal Affairs

From: North Carolina

Registered: 2009-10-18

Posts: 13,970

Re: Broadcom wireless driver

Maybe try purging firmware-b43-installer & firmware-b43legacy-installer and installing firmware-b43-lpphy-installer?  This worked last time I tried Statler on Sid.

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Please help us keep your forums manageable.

mynis01

#! Die Hard

From: 127.0.0.1

Registered: 2010-07-02

Posts: 2,005

Re: Broadcom wireless driver

Maybe try purging firmware-b43-installer & firmware-b43legacy-installer and installing firmware-b43-lpphy-installer?  This worked last time I tried Statler on Sid.

That's what I had to do after upgrading my kernel. The regular b43 works out of the box for me on statler with the debian stable kernel, but I needed lpphy for the newer kernel. After installing the .38 kernel, my wifi wouldn't work unless the switch was in the on position when I powered up the laptop. Eventually I figured out that I can use rfkill to enable the wifi card without restarting the whole system. My suspection is, some people that have a fn key wireless toggle button instead of a physical switch with moving parts like mine, might be having the same issue. If I do

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

without running rfkill first, I get

SIOCSIFFLAGS: Unknown error 132

ackernan

#! Junkie

Registered: 2011-01-10

Posts: 403

Re: Broadcom wireless driver

Maybe try purging firmware-b43-installer & firmware-b43legacy-installer and installing firmware-b43-lpphy-installer?  This worked last time I tried Statler on Sid.

I purged those and lost network connectivity. The drivers would not reinstall.  I tried several different things to recover.  I ended up doing a clean install after playing with it most of the day.