Going from Broadcom's sources to wireless card to WPA network

Tue Mar 1 03:53:41 UTC 2011

  [It seems to take ages for the mailing list to forward posts,
  so I have taken to cc'ing authors I reply to.] 

  stan wrote:
  >On Sat, 26 Feb 2011 22:58:22 -0800
  >"Suresh Govindachar" <sgovindachar at yahoo.com> wrote:
  >> 
  >> I read http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/README.txt
  >> carefully;  and in each of the following attempts, I made
  >> use of the instructions in the README.  I tried the rpms:
  >>
  >>     broadcom-wl-5.60.48.36-1.fc13.noarch.rpm
  >>     kmod-wl-2.6.35.6-48.fc14.x86_64-5.60.48.36-2.fc14.2.x86_64.rpm
  >>     kmod-wl-5.60.48.36-2.fc14.2.x86_64.rpm
  >>
  >> which didn't work.  Then downloaded sources from
  >>
  >>    http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
  >>
  >> and compiled on 2.6.28-18-generic Ubuntu, fc5, and rhel5 --
  >> none of these worked either.
  >
  ...
  > If you did get them to compile on the old versions, the
  > compiled versions probably wouldn't work on the new version
  > because the library APIs have changed.

  OK.

  > You could install the development group, and do it all
  > within the live CD environment, but that is a pretty big
  > project also.  And unless you put the result somewhere
  > permanent, you will lose it when you shut down.

  Since the the Live USB from Fedora-14-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso
  does not have a compiler (it does have make!), the
  "development group" to install needs to be pre-compiled.  
  I have room on the internal hard-drive, and I suppose the
  "development group" can be installed and used from there.  
  The output of a build of broadcom's sources is just a file
  that needs to be placed elsewhere.  So to set up this
  "development group" what needs to be downloaded and what 
  needs to be done with the downloaded stuff?  (I now have a
  wired connection to the internet;  I indicate how I got this
  below.)

  >> Then I tried what I should have tried at the very
  >> beginning: used an ethernet cable -- but F14 could not
  >> detect the network even via the ethernet cable!
  >
  > I haven't used a live CD for a while.  Do you have access to
  > a root terminal?  If you do you could check what is running
  > as your network service by running the command   
  >
  >   chkconfig --list | grep 5:on | less.  
  >
  > You can page up or down, or use the arrow keys.  Typing a
  > q  will exit. The network service is either NetworkManager
  > (likely on a live CD) or network, and one, and only one of
  > them should be there.  In either case you can run 
  > 
  >    ifconfig eth0 
  > 
  > to see if you have a network IP address.  And if you don't,
  > run 
  > 
  >   ifdown eth0 
  > 
  > to close the connection, and then
  > 
  >   ifup eth0   
  > 
  > to bring it up.  If you then run ifconfig eth0 again, you
  > should see an IP address. There must be something strange
  > about the networking hardware on your system.  I haven't had
  > any problems with finding a wired ethernet connection for
  > well over 10 years with various distributions of linux.
  > 
  > Usually there is a menu under System-Administration-Network
  > that allows you to do the same thing from the GUI.  That is,
  > you can tell the networking app to manually try bringing up
  > the connection again.  If it doesn't, you can then look in
  > the messages as described below to see why it failed.

  Thanks for the list of useful commands (provided above and
  below).  I prefer working from the command line (and have been
  making my life in Windows bearable by using things like MinGW,
  bash, perl, and vim).  

  I happened to get the wired network to function before I saw
  Stan's reply email.

  I did try using the Network icon (in the upper right corner of
  the default desktop) to refresh the connection, but it didn't 
  help.  I noticed that I was plugging in the ethernet cable
  after the system had booted -- I tried pluggin in the cable
  before booting -- and got network connection!  But it was only
  partial:  I could ping by name (eg, "ping yahoo.com" passed),
  but FireFox would not bring up any web-page -- it just kept
  waiting, with no error message.

  I then booted Windows -- the ethernet cable was connected
  while Windows was up;  then shut-down Windows and booted into
  F-14.  But even though the cable was plugged in before I
  booted F-14, I now did not have network connection.

  I went to the router and put that end of the cable into
  another slot, came back to F-14, and pressed the "apply"
  button on the Network settings dialog box for the etho0 tab.

  This time the GUI method worked to get me connected -- and
  Firefox started loading web-pages.  I went on to install
  Adobe's flash plugin, and verified that it worked.

  Next time I run into a broken wired connection, instead of
  going to the router physically, I'll try the "ifdown/ifup"
  command sequence.

  >> In thinking about moving from XP to Linux, I never expected
  >> that just getting started with Linux would be such a hassle!
  >
  > Usually it isn't.  Of course, different people have
  > different definitions of hassle, and what seems a minor
  > glitch to me might be a show stopper to you.   :-)  And vice
  > versa on Windows XP.  I would be lost if anything went wrong
  > if I was working with windows.  The last version I worked
  > with was XP and I remember how blind I felt when something
  > went wrong.  Like being in a foreign country where I didn't
  > speak the language.
  >
  >> To recap, the latest Ubuntu Live CD wouldn't even boot;
  >> the latest CentOS couldn't find the internal drive;  and
  >> F14 ended up not finding the network.
  >
  > CentOS couldn't find an internal drive?  That seems strange.
  > I think the latest CentOS is based on Fedora 6, which had no
  > trouble finding all my drives.  

  Sorry about the inexact remark "CentOS couldn't find the
  internal drive" which implies I did something to get CentOS to
  find the drive -- I didn't;  I just looked in the menu.  One
  of the three menus in the upper left of F-14 has an item "OS";
  clicking on this item opens up a folder at the root of the
  internal drive -- and, the process of opening this folder also 
  mounts this drive to /media/OS for use in the terminal window.

  > Is there anything unusual about the drive? 

  Not that I know of -- it is 2 year old Dell M6400 laptop.

  > What shows if you run   
  >
  >    blkid 
  >
  > in a terminal?  How about if you run   
  >
  >    lspci   
  >
  > ?  The first should show all drives (actually partitions on
  > the drives) that were recognized, the second should show if
  > the drive controllers were recognized.
  > 
  > And if you type   
  > 
  >    less /var/log/messages   
  > 
  > in a terminal do you see any messages about your network or
  > hard drive problem?  These are the messages the kernel wrote
  > as it brought your system live, and when it has a problem it
  > will usually write the reason it had a problem.
  > 
  > You can bring up a terminal via the menus, Applications ->
  > System Tools -> xterm or outside X,  
  > 
  >    Ctrl - Alt - F2 through F6.  
  >    Ctrl - Alt - F1 
  > 
  > gets you back to the GUI.

  Interesting -- you seem to be saying one can have 5 terminals
  when one is not booted into the GUI desktop?  I thought that
  without a GUI desktop, one only had one terminal at 640x480
  resolution!

  --Suresh