b43 driver oddities...
I know this is not strictly an amd64 matter, but I just discovered something
odd (for me) and wanted to understand if it's just me.
I have an asus A6K, with one of the (in)famous broadcom wireless chips.
Until kernel 2.6.24 I was only able to (partially) use wifi via ndiswrapper,
meaning that I could only use unencrypted or wep (almost the same) links,
wpa and wpa2 never worked. From time to time I also tried using the bcm43xx
driver, with no joy.
Then came 2.6.24 and, surprise surprise, ndiswrapper does not work any more.
It gets compiled and loaded ok, but no interface appears. I suppose there
was some API change in the kernel that was not corrected for in the
ndiswrapper code. On the other hand, the shiny new b43 driver appeared.
Apparently, still no joy. In particular, it was not possible to detect
networks, iwlist scan reported nothing, or more specifically "Interface
doesn't support scanning". Since I had also compiled in debugging for b43
and friends, I was surprised to find nothing on the syslog, no
initialisation. Then I tried issuing a "ifconfig wlan0 up" command (which
does not quite make sense to me). Lo and behold, immediately something
appeared on syslog, saying the radio was detected etc.. I retried
"iwlist scan", and I now also get a list of available networks. I still have
to test in depth, but it appears to work. Where exactly was it ever made
known that you have to "ifconfig up" your wireless interface before you can
have it list the available networks?
I hope this can be useful for others.
Ciao
Giacomo
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Giacomo Mulas <gmulas@ca.astro.it>
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