since alpha2 & beta1 wireless broken!
Posts: 2
i've recently downloaded and installed alpha2 and yesterday beta1. overall i'm preatty impressed. and in fact its the fastest booting linux i;ve ever seen. everything looks great and i;m very exicted to use it except that my wireless card no longer works.
unlike in all previous mepis's where my wireless card has just worked. first thing that seemed out of place was that it is labeled as eth1 instead of wlan0 from the oscenter. but also oscenter states that wireless is on eth1 so i thought that this shouldnt be a problem. i configured everything but it continued to not connect. after several minutes of scratching my head i opened a terminal and iwconfig eth1.
to my surprise eth1 had remained unconfigured, or at least all my tinkering in oscenter hadn't changed anything. so i reentered it thru iwconfig and then ifup'ed it. still unable to connect.
in a review of the boot sequence kernel modules for bcmxx where marked as fail and @ the 30% mark of bootup everything between 30% and 40% was labeled as fail.
thinking back on when i attempted using ubuntu i had a very simular problem with my wireless card being identified as a eth and that i could not get it to connect as such.
any thoughts on this?
I followed the suggestions
Posts: 113
I followed the suggestions above from mdmarmer and it worked great! My Broadcom wireless card is now working! Thank you for the great instructions!
Works on the "BCM4318 AirForce One" on an Acer Aspire 3690
Posts: 3
You have Broadcom wirelessEasiest to get it working with ndiswrapper
(Mepis alpha and beta 6.0 include Broadcom native driver that's hard to get working, but interferes with ndiswrapper)
[...]
ndiswrapper -m
Reboot
Howdy Mike,
Your instructions are flawless. I had already entered my ESSID, frequency, security info into the MEPIS Network Assistant the night before but no amount of editing and restarting and fun would get my wireless running.
After following your instructions to the first reboot I used the MEPIS Network Assistant to disable my wired connection and then immediately enabled my wireless connection. Works as advertised with the driver from Acer.
This is on an Acer Aspire 3690 laptop with a BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] (rev 02)
The supplied, native bcm43xx driver absolutely refused to work in MEPIS 6.5 on my system.
Thank you.
Wally
MEPIS 6.5 -- No more Xandros, no more macpherson
Linux registered user #339199
http://counter.li.org
Broadcom wireless
Posts: 1027
You have Broadcom wireless
Easiest to get it working with ndiswrapper
(Mepis alpha and beta 6.0 include Broadcom native driver that's hard to get working, but interferes with ndiswrapper)
First, blacklist the native driver by adding
#broadcom native driver
blacklist bcm43xx
to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
-- edit this file as root
for temporary fix --
rmmod bcm43xx
rmmod ndiswrapper
modprobe ndiswrapper
(this would need to keyed on every boot or put in a script -- that's why the blacklist is easier -- it prevents loading of the native driver)
ndiswrapper -l
#--( list drivers )
then, remove all drivers
ndiswrapper -e xxxxx
ndiswrapper -e yyyyy
ndiswrapper -e zzzzz
Then -- make sure all the windows drivers (.inf, and .sys -- are in the same directory)
cd /that/directory
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
(should reply driver present hardware present)
ndiswrapper -m
Reboot
Then reconfigure wlan0 in Mepis OS Center (reboot first -- be sure to click "apply" to save settings. )
http://www.mepislovers-wiki.org/index.php?title=Using_Ndiswrapper
http://www.mepislovers-wiki.org/index.php?title=Wireless_connection#Working_in_Mepis
If still having problems, log in as root to console
iwconfig
iwconfig wlan0 channel yourchannel#
iwconfig wlan0 essid YOURESSID
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifup wlan0
dhclient
{get working first without encryption -- add encryption later}
your channel # above is actual # like 11
Mepis OS Center expects freq -- 11 = 2.462
see this thread http://www.mepislovers.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=14994&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&start=0
Mike
Post to http://www.mepislovers.org -- very helpful forum
Download the user guide at left
Use the wiki http://www.mepislovers-wiki.org you can search it