kernel bug

[Bayard Coolidge]

I've been fighting ndiswrapper problems recently as well.

My laptop is an HP dv9000z (2GHz AMDx2, 2GB memory, two 80GB
drives, GeForce 6150 [I think]) and its wireless card is the infamous
Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN MiniPCI (rev.01) which uses the Broadcom
4311 Chipset.

I have GRUB stuffed on my first hard drive and use it to boot openSuSE
10.2 off of the second hard drive (or, on rare occasions, Windows XP
Media Edition off of the first hard drive). My SuSE 10.2 installation
currently runs the 2.6.18.8-0.9-default kernel. I installed ndiswrapper and
used a copy of the Windows Broadcom drivers that were on the first
drive. (I have since upgraded the Windows driver, but did NOT migrate
those bits over to the SuSE installation). This openSuSE 10.2 lash-up
works fine for wireless, including WPA-TKIP stuff. NO kernel instability
has EVER been noted thus far.

That said, I purchased a 250GB Western Digital MyBook external USB
drive to play with other Linux distros and so forth - gone are the days
of a loud deskside unit crammed with a bunch of U160 SCSI drives :-(

I can boot Fedora 8 and have been busily trying to configure it to my
liking in the hopes of eventually migrating it to the laptop's second hard
drive. (PLEASE: NO flame wars about which distro is better - that's NOT
my point here!). I also wanted to dabble with (K)Ubuntu Hardy Heron,
Fedora 9 Alpha, and openSUSE 11.0 Alpha. (K)Ubuntu never was
actually attempted after reading how its installer gleefully scribbles ext3fs
filesystems on every visible partition, whether requested to or not.
Fedora 9 seems to install OK, but won't boot - Grub gives me a "fickle
finger" about being unable to find any relevant files, so I'll troubleshoot
that later.

So, I went back and attempted to configure Fedora 8 for wireless. After
a couple of weeks of poking around, I came to the conclusion that it
ain't gonna work - it seems that that the 2.6.23 kernel series just won't
work with ndiswrapper, and that's what F8 runs. It purportedly will work
with 2.6.22 and it's supposedly (going to be) fixed in 2.6.24 or .25, but
last night I read a snippet in the lkml that the module is (still) marked as
'tainted' and therefore still can't be used. openSUSE 11.0 Alpha uses
the 2.6.24-rc7-git5 kernel, and attempting to build an ndiswrapper module
from the Sourceforge source tar ball fails miserably. I filed

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=363879


against that, FWIW.

But, here's my scenario: On Fedora 8, I blacklisted the bcm43xx driver,
plopped 'alias wlan0 ndiswrapper' into /etc/moduleprobe.conf, as
recommended, and can see that the module is being loaded and started
(I installed the bcmwl5 firmware per the ndiswrapper instructions) and
can see what appears to be the "bottom half" of the device driver.
My problem is that no amount of finagling with iwconfig, or the network
gui or Network Manager, can configure things to get the link up. It gives
me a message about a link failure and recommends checking the cable.
The /var/log/message file says "ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP):wlan0 link not ready".

I would LOVE to try the b43 driver (which is the newest on the block)
but I can't find a b43_fwcutter (just a bcm43xx_fwcutter), so I can't
extract/create the necessary 'bcm43xx_microcode5.fw' file (or its
b43 equivalent). Using the bcm43xx driver complains it's missing
since it is. I'm trying to run the 4.100.15.5 firmware from Dell's
R157517.EXE file, since that appears to be the newest available.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but that's a summary of what I've
encountered over the past 2-3 weeks. Obviously, any help would be
sincerely appreciated. It's very discouraging that we have this sort of
significant regression, and I hope it's resolved soon.

Thanks,

Bayard

"Brake for moose - it can save your life" - NHF&GD


       
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