[William_Wilson]

I am at my wits end, I have tried countless ideas and tutorials, and the best I can get is my networking light to come on (always on) and no internet without being wired to the modem.

I am not a Linux expert and this is my first use of Mint, though I have used older versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

I will offer what I can, hopefully someone can help me out with installing driver and/or firmware that will get this stupid thing working.

OS: Linux Mint Elyssa rev 1 (current version with updates)

from lspci:

Quote

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8071 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

I attempted to use mintWifi.py, but it appears to be missing currently... which doesn't actually surprise me after the number of things i've tried.
The windows wireless driver application appears to also be missing, so I may re-install, but I will still need some help getting the wireless working.

I have done several different methods of install with the bcm43xx drivers with an end result of "incorrect driver".

If you require more information or wish for me to try something, feel free to ask.
Any suggestion, no matter how basic I'm willing to try, if it even leads me in the right direction I'll be quite happy.

This post has been edited by William_Wilson: 26 September 2008 - 08:07 PM

[William_Wilson]

I re-installed and used the windows wireless driver tool supplied with Linux Mint and imported the bcm4311.inf driver. This still doesn't work, this too results in the network light staying lit constantly.
I suppose I could use Windows to access the internet, but it is frustrating... I know it must be possible.

[pr4y]

are you using ndiswrapper? it took me 4 hours to get my wireless card working properly on my laptop, but it IS possible. the reason for this is because the out of box distros that you are using to install the OS, do not come prebuilt for wireless networking. they include basic hardware drivers and offer driver downloads, but for the most part it isn't fully supported.

best bet would be to find your device ID [xxxx:xxxx] and google linux installation on that specific ID, because you will need to install ndiswrapper and configure THAT to handle your network controllers, rather than the system defaults.

[MorphiusFaydal]

Actually, they *do* support wireless networking.... Just not usually on Broadcom cards.

Broadcom cards are horrible in every way... Best bet to use ndiswrapper to try and get your card working.

[William_Wilson]

pr4y, on 26 Sep, 2008 - 09:48 PM, said:

best bet would be to find your device ID [xxxx:xxxx] and google linux installation on that specific ID, because you will need to install ndiswrapper and configure THAT to handle your network controllers, rather than the system defaults.

I have used ndiswrapper for a few of my last attempts, but it is possible my install was too messed up to work even if it was the solution. I will do some more work this weekend, hopefully i'll find something worth while using this, thanks

MorphiusFaydal, on 26 Sep, 2008 - 10:01 PM, said:

Actually, they *do* support wireless networking.... Just not usually on Broadcom cards.

Broadcom cards are horrible in every way... Best bet to use ndiswrapper to try and get your card working.

haha, this i've come to understand in the last couple of days. If I don't get it working in a few more days, i'll be stealing the wireless card from my other laptop (non broadcom) and end the trouble.

I don't believe the problem is with the cards, but rather that they do not release open source versions of their drivers, so it's a patch and hack method by developers to get them working.

This post has been edited by William_Wilson: 26 September 2008 - 07:14 PM

[baavgai]

If you're seeing it in lspci, that's good. The hardware itself and it's hook into the OS may be fine.

Do an ifconfig. If you have a working wifi card, you should see ath0 as a device. If it doesn't have an IP address, that could be your problem.

There is a rather new gotcha in Linux networking called NetworkManager. It's a cute little auto managment utility, nice for wifi roaming when it's playing nice. It can also fight other settings, particularly if you're trying to set up a static ip.

Things you can try:

Killing NetworkManager - I hate this thing.

If you have more than one device in your ifconfig, remove all but the one you want ( and lo, loopbacks are good).

Look in /etc/network/interfaces and see if it's what you expect.

When you make changes, this is your friend: sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Good luck.

[William_Wilson]

lspci is good and in ifconfig there are no others (excluding lo or course)

I will look into removing networkmanager

Quote

When you make changes, this is your friend: sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

I may be using this more than once before I'm done

Thanks, after i've tried everything, hopefully my next post will be from Linux.

This post has been edited by William_Wilson: 26 September 2008 - 07:27 PM

[William_Wilson]

Thank you guys so much!!

A combination of using an older copy of the windows driver i was using, rebuilding ndeswrapper and a few other tricks i don't know i can repeat and wireless is running smoothly.

Thanks again