i will not be upgrading to 6.0 due to wireless issues :(
Hello, I have been using Mepis exclusively for over a year now. I picked it as my distro of choice because my wireless card (yes, a broadcom) on my hp laptop.
The drivers (or a pre-configured ndiswrapper) have been included in every release from 3.3 up.
It makes me very sad that the final release of 6.0 does NOT do this.
I am by no means a wimp when it comes to configuring and upgrading my system. I am not afraid of doing almost any amount of foolery in order to configure my system. However, my HARDWARE should work out of the box, ESPECIALLY my network hardware that ALREADY WORKED in previous releases.
You may notice that I signed up on this site JUST to post this. This is becaus pretty much everything I ever needed to do I have been able to do with Mepis since I first installed 3.3 over a year ago.
Yes I know that I could configure ndiswrapper manually. I've done it on other systems but it is a horrible horrible horrible pain EVERY TIME. I HATE ndiswrapper, or more accurately having to configure it with fiddly little commands in a text window. Plus having to go to broadcom's website (oh wait i cant because my wireless card doesnt work and i dont have physical access to the wired part of the network so i'd have to waste a cd-r to burn like 3mb(less?) of data)
Why did you do this to me and others like me, Warren? Did you not get enough donations from grateful people were happy not to have to fool with the misery that is ndiswrapper (or any driver nonsense in Linux which is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS HORRIBLE AND WRONG)?
I'm sure it was a personal
I'm sure it was a personal attack against you. Warren just has a vendetta. He told me so.
On a serious note, have you not posted on these forums or others for help? Your hardware will not always work...it won't always work in Windows, either. We all need help from time to time. Post a question and ask for some help. Don't act like it's a personal grudge against you, and that Mepis was made this way to spite you.
Were you one of the grateful people who donated? I've moved on to PCLinuxOS, but I maintain a subscription here because I'll probably be back eventually (I always have before.) If so, that's great. If not, that's okay also. But please, ask for advice before going off the deep end.
It's probably not as hard as you think...
Now I don't know what broadcom card you have because you haven't said, but work has been going on in the linux community to write open source drivers for broadcom chips so users like you can avoid ndiswrapper. Without much help from broadcom I might add.
Some of those are included in the new Mepis 6.0
Unfortunately, they don't work with all broadcom cards - but usually you don't have to install ndiswrapper manually to fix this. What you usually have to do is blacklist the broadcom driver that is causing the problem and then Mepis will pick your card up on the next reboot and install the proper ndiswrapper for you like it used to.
The driver that seems to be causing the most trouble is the 43xx one. If that applies to you then, as root, add the line
blacklist bcm43xx
to the file etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
and then reboot. It will probably work.
For more info, look here:
http://www.mepislovers.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=16211&forum=33&post_id=111858#forumpost111858
Well I didnt actually think
Well I didnt actually think that Warren was purposefully trying to annoy his users. That was just me being silly. Probably in bad taste I know.
I just really think that manually installing, configuring, poking, etc with ndiswrapper is a highly excruciating pain and
I LOVED Mepis for the sole reason that I didnt have to do that. It *just worked* first boot, every time.
No, Windoze doesn't fire up the wireless card first boot either but fixing driver issues (as long as a driver exists) is about 99999999e9x easier than with linux because you just about always have to recompile the kernel to poke the new driver in. I dont have the level of masochism to recompile my kernel on a machine I use every single day for almost everything I do with a computer. I dont mind recompiling on my servers/test boxen because I dont miss them at all for the several hours for which they are totally useless while recompiling. But, when I dont have my laptop it's like I'm missing an appendage.
bah, my point is that I expect my hardware that worked in 3.4 to still work as easily if not MORE easily in 6.0. It doesnt. i dont *need* to upgrade but I do like running the latest version just because. I guess I wont be now.
And yes, I did donate and I dont regret it I just wish I didnt have to manually config ndiswrapper because as I said I absolutely HATE doing that.
Give timkb4cq's advice a try
Give timkb4cq's advice a try and let us know if it works. There are probably others with similar questions, if not now then later.
RE:It's probably not as hard as you think...
True.
I run MEPIS 6.0 on my Gateway m675prr laptop. It has a Broadcom 4306 wireless chip on board. When 6.0 came up I didn't have a wireless connection, but I blacklisted the bcm43xx driver, used ndiswrapper to delete all the wireless drivers except the bcml5 driver, rmmod ndiswrapper and then did a modprobe ndiswrapper, which turned on my wireless light, then I did modprobe -m to make it a permenant setting.
I didn't reboot. I just used iwconfig to configure my wlan0 interface and ifup to load it. I uses Mepis utilities to set up the wireless to configure /etc/network/interfaces.
Now it comes up automatically at every boot.
--
GreyGeek
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...................
I'm going over my written notes of the install I did on a second hard drive on my laptop (Broadcom bcm4318v2 chipset), Friday afternoon/evening:
(1.) Install.
(2.) Copy drivers from Linksys CD /Drivers/NT/ to someplace on the filesystem. (See: http://gabston-howell.org/wl/2006/06/12/wireless-woes-reloaded/ )
(3.) ndiswrapper -e [all wireless drivers].
(4.) ndiswrapper -i LSBCMNDS.inf
(5.) Blacklist bcm43xx driver
(6.) Enter ESSID, channel freq., WEP/WPA
(7.) Stop WLAN0
(8.) Start WLAN0
(9.) Surf to your hearts content, 'cause you're done.
Works just fine at boot.
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Simply adding the blacklist bcm43xx line and rebooting my HP Pavilion zv6201 laptop was not enough to get its broadcom wireless chip working on SimplyMEPIS v6.0 or any of the v6.0 RC's or betas. As expected, the ndiswrapper configuration outlined above was necessary and worked well for me.