followup on Ubuntu 7.04 and Broadcom wireless (got it working)

[bogstad-e+AXbWqSrlAAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Bill Bogstad)]

On 5/10/07, Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> There is a lot of info on the Ubuntu forums. What was your problem with
> fwcutter?. In my case, it complained about the version of the .sys
> file, but it also lists the acceptable versions. I downloaded a working
> version, and it took 2 seconds to set up.

It took me a while, but I went back to the laptop in question and did
a totally fresh
install of Ubuntu 7.04 after looking through their forums.  This time
it worked for me.
Unfortunately, I didn't take notes, but this is approximately what I did:

1. Installed 7.04.
2. Installed all current updates via wired connection.
3. Installed fwcutter and allowed it to download it's default firmware.
4. Installed new network manager (Find out about it on forums.  It's NOT part of
default Ubuntu install).

Note: I didn't select any special repositories to get special versions
of software.
This was just using the Synaptics package manager with its' default
configuration.

5. Reboot.

Note: The Ubuntu forums  indicate that if you attempt to manually
configure wireless before using the new network manager that it will
refuse to touch the interface until
you go remove things from configuration files.  So don't try to do
anything with the wireless until you've installed all the software.

At this point the little network icon on the screen showed up with
wireless functionality and it was able to see multiple networks.  I
was then able to configure the machine
via the gui interface to connect to my 'secure' WPA network.  It's
been working fine with one exception. It is limited to 11Mbps.
Checking out the forums/mailing lists for the 43xx driver indicates
that there is some kind of timing issues in the driver so higher
speeds are not currently supported.  I think there are some source
patches to force it to run at a higher speed, but I haven't tried
them.

Note: This is all on an older Broadcom chipset 4306.  My take from my
browsing of
the drivers mailing list/wiki is that newer chips have issues.  I
would still stay away from Broadcom wireless for a new purchase
(probably a newer chipset), but if you
tried unsuccessfully to get Broadcom wireless to work on an older
laptop you might try again with the current software.

Bill Bogstad

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.