New thread, broadcom 802-11 related

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> writes:
> Trying to make the broadcom 802-11g BCM4318 chipset in an HP Pavilion 
> dc5320us lappy with an AMD turion cpu in it, running FC5 in the x86 
> (not x86-64, that wouldn't even start to install).  

Inspired by your travails I decided to try to get the BCM4318 in my
Turion HP/Compaq v5000z running under FC5/x86_64.

(NB: I had previously added livna to the list of repo's.)

	yum install ntfs
	mkdir /mnt/ntfs	
	mount -r -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs

	yum install ndiswrapper 
	cd /mnt/ntfs/SWSETUP/WLAN
	ndiswrapper -i bcmw15.inf

It turns out this driver only works for 32-bit kernels.  The 64-bit
kernel needed the 64-bit ms-windows drivers.  (Getting ntfs running
was useful even if this was a dead end in terms of the wireless.)

Next was to grab some 64-bit drivers from here:

        ftp ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_3020_5020/driver/winxp64bit/80211g.zip

        unzip 80211g.zip
        ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

Then the next problem hit.  The drivers expected a certain pci card ID
("4318") .  My card's ID was "1" greater than it expected ("4319").
This was discovered via:

        lspci -n -vvv

I then added the ID alias with:

	ndiswrapper -d 14e4:4319 bcmwl5

At this point the driver was functional and a reboot showed that it
did show up as "wlan0".

system-configure-network was useless at finding the new interface.  It
didn't even offer any reasonable choices for wireless chips.  I ended
up letting it make an "eth1" with some incorrect chip just as a
placeholder.  I then moved the 3 copies of the files to the name
"wlan0" as below:

        /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
        /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-wlan0
        /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/ifcfg-wlan0

(These files should all be hard links to the same physical file.)

Probably it would have been faster to just write the ifcfg-wlan0 file
directly.  Here is mine, lightly edited to remove IP's and passwords:

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

# broadcom bcm4318 wireless
#
# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:00:00:00:00:00
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Wireless
DHCP_HOSTNAME=my_short_name
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
PEERDNS=no
ESSID=myessid
CHANNEL=6
MODE=Managed
RATE=Auto
#
# autonegotiated IPV6 addr is broken on wlan0 - added by hand.
#
IPV6ADDR=XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX
IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=wlan0
IPV6_DEFAULTGW=XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX
IPV6ADDR_SECONDARIES=XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX
#
# end

And the WEP keys go into a mode 400 file with 3 hard links to the
following paths:

        /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-wlan0
        /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/keys-wlan0
        /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/keys-wlan0


$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-wlan0
KEY1=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
KEY2=BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
KEY3=CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
KEY4=DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Upon rebooting everything came up.  It is still annoying that ipv6
auto-configuration doesn't work, but at least one can beat it into
submission via a configuring by hand.

One last note: I run my own named since I found most public DNS
servers at ISP's to be quite old and rickety.  One will want to turn
on peerdns via "USEPEERDNS=1" if the laptop doesn't have a local named
running.

-wolfgang

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