Hi Moe,

I gave a copy of Navigatrix to my boat neighbor and we can not seem to get it to recognize the wyfi card on his Dell laptop. I went to terminal mode and did an ifconfig -a and it shows the ethernet conection but no wlan. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Tim
Zephyrś Aura

P.S. My Yahoo account got hacked and someone sent out a lot of spam. I do not know if itś related but I can not log in under the username Zephyrś Aura.

Nothing drives me madder than anything than WiFi troubles except maybe outboard motor troubles..

Sometimes it's a simple oversight so I'm embarrassed to mention the number of times I have inadvertently whacks the <FN> key and the <F3> key (with the nearly invisible blue print indicating wifi). This is a 'hardware' switch that toggles power to the radio. Some models had a real mechanical switch, others, like mine and possibly this yours, the hardware switch is a couple of key strokes.

I go to send the mail,e.g., and not only had I lost my connection, but all the Access Points broadcasting their SSID tags are gone. I chase my tail for a few minutes stumbling to the discovery that I don't have a wi-fi card at all. This is news to me because I just used it.<doink>Oh yeah...I've got this bloody switch that I accidentally keep flipping.

To make matters worse the Wifi "ON" idiot light was either off or on, but didn't seem to reflect if the wifi was working. because there is also a 'software' switch that disconnects it from talking the kernel, but maintaining power to the radio. The light is on, but there is nobody home.

That was me until I learned to check if there was gas in the tank, or the fuel cutoff valve was turned the right way before I pulled the starter cord for five minutes panting a curse to some hapless horse and the fella who just rode it.

I was saved from madness by rfkill list all
I could see if my WIFI was blocked either soft or hard and then 'flick' the right switch using sudo to get permission.

There are a set of options behind rfkill --help or a bit more words in man rfkill This way you avoid chasing your tail. I've heard it does happen.

But I can tell we are not that lucky and it is not that the wifi card is switched 'off' that it is not recognized, but that it was ignored completely. Machines can be very rude.

lspci | grep lan -i will tell what it thinks is there.LiSt PCI devices p|pe it to Globally search a Regular Expression and Print "lan' -It doesn't matter if it's uppercase/lowercase.

It the Wifi 'card' is connected through USB then it will be lsusb | grep lan -i. Surprise-surprise some machines have the WiFi on the USB bus but still internal.

Then we'll check which modules are being called up to see it the automagic detection is stuffed up. lsmod | grep wifi or grep 802 as one might miss what another returns.

If the number seem to match, but it still doesn't work I pick something identifiable dmesg | grep rtl -i to look through Displayed MESsaGes pipe it to grep searching for a scrap.

If it looks fine, but still doesn't work, I check to see if anyone else in the world has this problem, or it just me. I was told the rtl8192se drives the RTL8191SEvB device.

Thanks Moe! As always youŕe a welth of information. Iĺl give all a try and see where we stand. Unfortunately john is out working, so I will have to wait until he returns to give it a go.

Thanks again,

Tim

Hi Moe,

Just tried everything on your previous post. when I run them on my computer I get returns that look like yours. On Johns computer I get nothing.

His computer is a Dell Studio 1737.

I believe that it is not reconizing the hardware.

Thanks again.

Tim

You're right.

I did a quick look and Dell Studio 1737 appears to be known for picking up the wrong wireless driver and then not knowing what to do. Word on the street is it's a Broadcom chip....gimme a moment to clear my head.

In the meantime to figure out what driver it's picking up for SuperUser to DO a LiSt of PCI devices -verbosely PIPE the output to Globally search for a Regular Expression and Print the 12 lines -After finding "net" regardless of case (-i) of the search term.

It will look like (plus other garbage):What we're looking for is Kernel driver in use: Mine is the ' rtl8192se'.

If 12 lines isn't enough to show it..increase it. It's still easier than running sudo lspci -v without the grep and manually sifting through the output...which you could also try.

Thanks again Moe!

John will be away from the boat for a couple of weeks I'll let you know how it goes when he gets back.

Tim

Hi Moe,

I finally got it. It's a Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY Rev01

Driver: b43-pci-bridge

Thanks again for all of your help!

Tim

There are two ways to deal with this.

1) Blacklist current module and use the "wl" module which is an alternative.

2) Install the attached firmware.

sudo dpkg -i /location/of/file/ firmware-b43-lpphy-installer_015-9_all.deb

I'm a little brain-dead at the moment so the latter might be a better choice.

Hi Moe,

We installed the firmware and got the following message.

Reading database ... 181053 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace firmware-b43-lpphy-installer 1:015-9 (using firmware-b43-lpphy-installer_015-9_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement firmware-b43-lpphy-installer ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of firmware-b43-lpphy-installer:
firmware-b43-lpphy-installer depends on b43-fwcutter (>= 1:015-9); however:
Package b43-fwcutter is not installed.

dpkg: error processing firmware-b43-lpphy-installer (--install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
firmware-b43-lpphy-installer
nx@nx:~/Downloads$

We lost our ethernet connection after running the installer.

Thanks again for all your help.

Tim

Yeah, unfortunately I'm not much help.

Let me take a deep breath...we'll give it another whack from another angle.

These are the the modules in NavigatrixThis is the advice from http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

Your first command needs to be sudo -s so you'll be root to give yourself the permission needed for the other commands. E.g., echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist won't work unless you're root.

The First Mate had a Dell with TrueMobile wifi at one time and as recall we used the wl module.

Hang on a tick. I'm having trouble locating it...brb.

I'm going to have to pick this up later.... it's 4:40AM and my eyes are crossing.

/lib/modules/3.8.11-dsp/updates/dkms/wl.ko


I'll getback to this....

This has me stumped, Tim (and John).

If you look at http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Supported_devices you'll see the BCM4312 LP-PHY listed as supported.

In https://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx it states:All of the fiddly stuff with work arounds and such have been eliminated in kernels after 3.0.

...plus if the ethernet is now buggered, well....

The course of action might be to blacklist the b43 module and insert the wl (non-opensource) module.This removes the b43 and 'helper' modulesThis loads up the wl module that you have already downloaded and placed in the direcorty listed in the previous post. (sudo cp ~/Downloads/wl.ko /lib/modules/3.8.11-dsp/updates/dkms/wl.ko)

If...if, it works...For superpowers in a compound command...which appends the blacklisted module to the end of the blacklist file to make the changes permanent. The advice from the wireless guys is to blacklist brcmsmac as well as bcma.

Good luck.

Hi Moe,

John came by the boat tonight and I tried again. I ran sudo -s and was set as root. Everything works well until I run "sudo modprobe wl". Then I get module wl not found. When I look in the directory it is there. I'm probably missing something simple.

Thanks again for all of your help.

Tim

Yeah, I forgot to mention depmod, a little program that generates the files that contains module dependencies and info (FYI: ls /lib/modules/`uname -r'/ to list them). Sorry.John's machine didn't know that wl was there because it wasn't on the list.

Run sudo depmod and the rest will fall into place....I hope.

Interesting dull reading can be found with man modprobe and man depmod.

Following this thread with interest. Using a Dell Studio 1535 myself. Initially I installed Nx to the hd straight from a ver 0.5 stick, and it installed WL as the driver for the wireless card (BCM 4312) by default. My AP is flaky due to low power and distance, so was never able to connect.

As I had Nx installed on the old Dell tower, I ended up cocpying over the image of that drive to the Studio drive to avoid having to recreate the changes, add ons, data, etc. Worked well, but wifi is now via the old crappy Netgear usb nic and ndiswrapper.

Need to re-install WL to try and get the internal card working for when the laptop is not on the boat. Looks like this thread is a good start.

Tks

Yeah, David, the package for wl.ko is broadcom-sta-dkms

I peeled the module out of there because the package will take 6.2MB + 2.2MB download. Whereas the module by itself is a hair over 3MB.

You just gotta remember depmod.

Hi Moe,

John came by again this past weekend. We ran pedmod and all is now up and running. Thanks again Moe!!! You're the best.

Tim

I found an easy fix for this. Not sure how easy yours is, may be easier I dunno.

go to packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/all/linux-firmware-nonfree/download
and download the linux-firmware-nonfree from one of the mirrors listed.

This downloads a deb file. then just click on the deb file and and run install.

then open a terminal window and type:
sudo modprobe -r b43
sudo modprobe b43

your wireless light should pop on.