Native Airport Extreme Drivers

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

Access Point: Invalid means that your card can't see any APs when scanning. If you are not broadcasting your SSID, SoftMAC cannot connect to the AP. If you have a bcm4318, get closer to the AP and make sure there isn't much interference. If you have a radio button, make sure it's turned on and if it's an ACPI button, make sure you have the software to enable it.
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aych · Guru Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 304

my access point is broadcasting. it works fine with ndiswrapper. but with this native driver i cant scan anything out

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

aych:
I can't tell you why it's not working because you haven't really provided any information. Are you bringing up the interface first (ifconfig ethX up)? The interface must be up to get scan results. Which firmware are you using? Can you paste the debugging information from bcm43xx please? What card do you have ( lspci -vvn | grep -i 14e4 )?
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orethrius · Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 9:03 am Post subject:

Jose, I have the BCM4318 as well, are there any logs I can post to help (it appears part of the problem is the radio_attenuation variable)? I apologise if I missed any helpful suggestions as I didn't browse the entire thread - perhaps this chip has already been addressed.

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

orethrius:
No, like it says on the first post, we're still working on the 4318. Basically, the TX power was completely changed between 4306 and newer revisions of the chips. We're still working on getting something that will work on both older versions and the newer chipsets. It's taking longer than expected, but we're still working on it. For now, the only thing you can do is to reduce the ammount of outside interference and get closer to your AP. I will let everyone here know when we have a working patch, okay?

Sorry.
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ConVicTioN · Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 1:07 am Post subject:

Keep up the good work I have been wait for something like this for a long time.

Thanks
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qleak · n00b Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 67

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

Well, it might work. :) I really should have said that if your AP doesn't broadcast beacons or respond to probe requests, you shouldn't be able to connect. SoftMAC makes a list of APs before connecting. If your AP doesn't show up in that list, you can't connect.
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bifteckrouge · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 5 Location: Boston

I figured I should post how I was able to get my bcm4311 card working... It's a Dell 1390 WLAN card which identifies itself as a bcm4311. This card is a mini-pci-e card and as such does not work out of the box with the bcm43xx drivers.

JoseJX had linked to an untested 10 piece patchset back on page 29 of this thread to hack in mini-pci-e support: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=114805420427939&w=2

I'm running the latest mm-sources 2.6.18-rc2-mm1. I patched the kernel with the 10 patches and compiled and installed the module. Prior to using this patchset I could load the module but literally nothing happened (no new interface, dmesg output would have a line or two). Afterwards the module appeared to be working.

I setup the wireless as described in the first posts on here... however, everytime i would run DHCPCD I noticed my wireless light went out (my Dell e1505 has a wireless light above the keyboard). Since I own the AP I was trying to use, I went ahead and set a static IP and was able to talk to things. I downgraded DHCPCD to see if perhaps that fixed my DHCP problem (went to version 2.0.0) and sure enough I can obtain an IP now.

My only problem at this point seems to be I occasionally get bumped from the wireless and have to reload the settings (I don't see freqs changing but who knows) and my speed is fairly slow (but at least I get net).

Other users like bigun89 have asked about DHCP related problems so I figured I would post my experience above... that and I figured perhaps it would help to get more confirmation on the patchset working for me at least. As always, the patchset isn't 'tested' yet... but then again the bcm43xx driver is still a driver in an alpha stage and it's worked for me.

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 756

ok first off i have the following card.

Bigun · Advocate Joined: 21 Sep 2003 Posts: 2155

I'm having a strange issue with 2.6.18-rc3 vanilla driver.

It seems to be disconnecting at random, I'm looking over dmesg for clues, although it's hard to trace a seemingly random error.

*EDIT*

I figured it out.... and this may require it's own post, I'm not sure.

But when I change video modes, the network link quits. I have to un-load and re-load the driver too.

Dmesg shows no errors or indicators that anything is wrong, and it is *NOT* kernel dependent, I tried this with rc1 as well.
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kEiNsTeiN · Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 361 Location: Germany

Hi! Sorry for not reading 31 pages, but I have one question:

Is the driver still not capable of using 54 mbit/s?

I got it to work some time ago, but 11 is just way too slow for my purposes...

Edit: if it's dependent on my card:
Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
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JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

No, it's still not capable of transmitting reliably at > 11M (and it's a little shakey on some cards at that speed too :) ).

We're doing the best we can. :p It's 800k of binary driver we're working with. :(
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kEiNsTeiN · Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 361 Location: Germany

Oh, sorry, didnt want to be rude

. You guys rock! Great work!
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guyr · Apprentice Joined: 17 Aug 2004 Posts: 237

orethrius · Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 7:09 am Post subject:

wizard69 · Apprentice Joined: 22 Sep 2003 Posts: 178 Location: Berlin

just wanted to say thanks for this great driver at last i can stop using ndiswrapper. WPA with AES also works for me with gentoo-2.6.17-r4 i couldn't get TKIP to work but perhaps it was a config error.

My NIC is a Linksys WMP54g

Vizy · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 1

Hi

I'm also trying to establish a wireless connection on my G4 iBook with no success. I'm kinda new to linux so plz be pattient

so here it is. I did everything according to the HOWTO, and got stuck here:

step 6 was fine and i have this:

mwallace · Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 8:27 pm Post subject:

Hi,

this whole "DriveReady SeekComplete Error" thing has nothing to do with your wireless network. It's the harddisk. But that's another problem. I think you'd better backup your data, cause the death of your drive might be close.

Now, the firmware files seem to be incomplete. Which version and which file of the downloadable fw did you use? What G4 exactly do you have? The 4318 revisions of the wlan-card are not yet supported.

terry · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2002 Posts: 64 Location: Korea Seoul

vicaya · n00b Joined: 26 Jun 2004 Posts: 57

Some notes to save somebody sometime.

Okay, I was upgrading my kernel to 2.6.17-suspend2-r4 on my amd64 laptop. So I decided to try bcm43xx while I was at it. Bam, kernel panic (null pointer reference in bcm43xx). Searching through bcm43xx-dev mailing list revealed that the driver doesn't support DMA beyond 1GB (using 30bit DMA of course). My laptop is 1GB + 256MB (soldered). So I reconfigured the driver to use PIO mode only. It actually worked (using it now. WEP with wpa_supplicant. Didn't change any userland stuff). But the performance is abysmal, which is somewhat expected. The speakeasy test shows that download speed is about 60kbps (I have a 10mbps cable connection and I regularly get 9-10mbps using ndiswrapper.) The upload is however still at 384kbps, which is surprising (maybe a test error?)

Anyway, keep up the good work. Though I'm reverting to ndiswrapper after this post...

Kuhndog86 · Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:51 pm Post subject: Success with BCM4311!!!

I have gotten the new(ish) mini PCI-Express BCM4311 going with gentoo. See my post on the BCM43xx forums here:
http://bcm43xx.spugna.org/index.php?topic=119.0
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Boukyaku · n00b Joined: 07 Aug 2006 Posts: 3

i would just like to say, excellent work

.

My hardware is the Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi.

To save people some trouble, first of all, don't use udev 96. Second of all, i don't know why, but my bcm4318 device does not work with gentoo-sources-2.6.17-r5. It installs fine, uses firmware fine (when ifconfig eth# up), but when i iwlist eth# scan, it does not find any AP nodes at all, even when i set it right next to the node. it works perfectly with gentoo-sources-2.6.17-r4.

Keep up the good work!

chronophobic · Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 3:50 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I have a bcm4310 and I followed the guide in the first post of this thread. Everything works out fine with no errors (including dmesg, as far as I can see), but in the end there's no eth device apart from eth0, which is the lan card. iwconfig only lists lo and eth0 as well and I have no idea where to start troubleshooting this.

Thanks in advance

Edit: ok, some info
gentoo sources 2.6.17-r5, running ~x86 so I'm using the latest versions of everything involved.
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JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

The 4311/4312 cards (which your 4310 actually is, check lspci -n | grep 14e4) are not supported out of the box. See the post by Kuhndog86 above for more info.
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