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Re: Acer 5024WLMI and wireless

For once, I can actually respond with some [hopefully] useful info!

I have a Compaq V2311 with an internal Broadcom 4318 (rev 02) that I got working just last night.  This laptop is also Turion-based.

I'm not using the laptop at the moment, so if direct links are needed I can follow up when I can turn it on and review, but here it is in a nutshell from memory:

Running debian pure unstable, kernel 2.6.12 (debian packaged)-- I didn't try other kernels, YMMV
You'll need at least the kernel headers, or kernel source that has been configured so that the version.h file is built (go with the headers package)
Grab the ndiswrapper sources from sourceforge (v 1.3rc2 is it?  The latest tarball)
Use the Acer 64-bit Broadcom driver (not the generic 64-bit one from linuxant)


ndiswrapper:

extract the archive contents.
inside the ndiswrapper source directory is a debian directory, but the control files are for i386
cd debian ; perl -p -i -e 's|i386|amd64|g' control* ; cd ..
At the top of the ndiswrapper source dir, make ; make deb

The resulting ndiswrapper and ndiswrapper-utils debi packages can be installed with dpkg.  They should end up at the same level as the ndiswrapper source directory.

If all goes well and you install the resulting .deb packages, you'll have /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper and /lib/modules/<kernel-version>/misc/ndiswrapper.ko ready to go.


Acer driver:
The archive I located had these files in it
BCMWL564.SYS  Version.txt  bcm43xx.cat  bcmwl5.inf

(again, I'll have to follow up if you need more info... like where I found the Acer files that I'm actually using.  I happened to have copied the .rar file they were in onto this machine I'm using now to unrar them... I have the files here if needed)

That Version.txt file contains
TITLE
        AMBIT G (Broadcom solution) Wireless LAN driver (T60H906.00)" for XP-64BIT -WW-

PRODUCT DATA
    VERSION      : v3.100.64.0
    BUILD ID     : FBWG01WWd


This one works, a later one may as well.  YMMV


when you have these files, as root

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

(include the path to that .inf file if appropriate)

this installs the driver in /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5/

You'll see a couple of lines about some parameters being changed... I believe these are parameters in the config files (keep reading), I didn't have to touch any of this stuff.

In that directory you'll see a config file with the pci device id like

14E4:4318.5.conf

As long as that's there, you're in good shape (hopefully I got those first 4 digits correct... I think that's right).


ndiswrapper -l (that's a lower-case L)
will list the driver and hardware, you should see a message that the bcmwl5 driver is installed and hardware is found

If that's the case,

modprobe ndiswrapper.ko


In my case, a nice light came on as soon as the module loaded, and from there it was a matter of iwconfig'ing the essid and key values for my wireless net setup.  Worked great from there on out.

I did try the linuxant generic driver, but that is set up for the 4320 part, which is a rev 03 device... nothing but a couple of error messages when I tried to load the ndiswrapper module, and that's after I tried playing around with the settings and the name of the config files (the config flie name is important... I changed one of the 4320.5.conf files to 4318.5.conf)  but that went nowhere.

The Acer driver worked instantly


Hope that helps.  Having the correct driver files was essential, building deb packages for ndiswrapper was a piece of cake.

Good luck

-dh



On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 13:02 +0200, Tim T. wrote: 
Hi,

  I recently bought an AMD64 Turion based ACER WLMi which also
features a broadcom 4318,
  which is turned on by a switch on the front of the laptop.  It looks
as though this switch needs
  some  sort of software to turn on the radio. I haven't found any
information on how make this
  work. (looks as though ndiwrapper does support the chipset
otherwise, which is somewhat
 frustrating.)

  Since I need wireless to work, I've decided to get a PCMCIA based
card for now. What would be a
  good card to get, given that I want to run an AMD64 based system ?
Which card/vendor has
  64 bit drivers ? 

  (Or does anybody have any idea on how to turn on the radio ?)

  Thanks in advance for any help,

   TimT.
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