Success

Well, I finally got the wireless on my laptop working with the new b43
driver.

A bit of background for those who were not at the meeting. Conrad
brought an alpha of Hardly Heroin which I tried on my laptop. (I
believe I have tried this with every release since 6.10) I have always
had to use ndiswrapper to make my wireless work. Also, the SD card slot
on my laptop has never worked in Linux. It was always "almost, but not
quite." Dmesg would report seeing something when I plugged a card in,
but could never access it. Well, with the latest Ubuntu, the SD card
slot worked right away. I also got the wireless working with just a bit
of fiddling with firmware issues. By apt-getting b43-fwcutter from
"universe" it offered to download and set up the firmware, but the live
CD doesn't enable "universe" by default. Presumably, it would have
"just worked" had I installed Ubuntu to the hard drive.

As I'm still not really interested in doing a big upgrade, I figured I
could simply use the latest kernel which had support for both of my
devices. As the meeting ended, I was still unable to find the "b43"
driver in "menuconfig" in the latest kernel source.

I eventually tried "compat-wireless-2.6" which is supposed to be the
latest bleeding edge wireless drivers. It would load "b43" but didn't
seem to detect my card, even after installing the requested firmware files.

After more digging, I discovered that if I enabled
"Networking->Wireless->Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)"
then the "B43" driver would appear in "Device Drivers->Network device
support->Wireless LAN"

After compiling and installing again, this driver complained (in dmesg)
that the firmware I had was too new. (from the "wireless-compat-2.6"
attempt) I followed the instructions in dmesg to download and cut the
appropriate firmware. I tried loading the b43 driver again, and it
found my hardware, but didn't connect to my AP. A quick reboot solved
that issue, and now I'm running with the native "B43" driver instead of
ndiswrapper, and my SD slot works!

So, in the end, I might not have to upgrade my trusty old 6.10.

ttyl
srw
Received on Fri Mar 21 10:33:41 2008