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Re: Broadcom b43 drivers



On 06/05/2015 03:25 AM, Darac Marjal wrote:

On Thu, Jun 04, 2015 at 05:41:27PM -0500, Jose Martinez wrote:

    OK, I probably have my system all messed up.  Here's the sequence of
    events:

      Discovered errors with the nouveau driver (I'm using NVIDIA GeForce 7130
      chipset) and did some research, nvidia-detect recommended the legacy
      304xx driver, so I followed all the instructions on the wiki for
      installing said driver.  This broke the system.  X would not start, I
      have only command line.

      Not being really up to speed on everything needed to fix the system, and
      having tried several thing to no avail, I boot to rescue mode, using the
      installer environment so that previous root is not mounted.  I deleted
      everything, except /root and /home, wherein I have data I do not want to
      lose, in order to start with a basically clean slate.

      I download and burn the jessie net-install CD and boot to that and
      install jessie.

      My broadcom wireless (using the BC4321 AG chipset) will not come up.
      This is not unexpected, there is no firmware installed as of yet for
      that NIC.

      I follow all of the instructions on wiki for obtaining the firmware and
      installing it to bring the card up (which worked in a previous
      incarnation of the system).  The card still will not come up.

Check the syslog and/or dmesg. The kernel SHOULD log a message to the
effect that it has found the firmware and loaded it.


      I pulled out the old driver I was using which I got from broadcom, and
      had installed it in the past to get everything working.  I attempted to
      install it using the instructions provided with the driver (which had
      worked in the past). The card still will not come up.

      I do an lspci | grep Network command and the controller does show up
      (03:00.0).

As an interim measure, are you able to install using a different (e.g.
wired) adapter. You may find getting the firmware to work on an
installed system easier than on the installer.


    What the devil am I doing wrong, and how do I get my wifi adapter back??
    Note that I had used the firmware-b43-installer package in a past jessie
    incarnation and it worked great.

  --
  JM
Sven, Darac, Thank you for your input. The driver was not compiled for the current Jessie kernel. It had been compiled for Wheezy back in August. What threw me off was the fact that if I had a Wheezy system and updated to Jessie, the driver was happy. This time, however, was a clean install of Jessie with no upgrade from Wheezy. I don't understand all the ins and outs of the situation, but I suspect that there is a little difference in the compile between the two distributions, but that if Wheezy is already installed, the kernel is maintained through the upgrade. But, with a fresh install of Jessie with no previous kernel, the kernel installed isn't quite the same and so causes the error. I'm basically guessing at that, but I suspect I'm not far off the mark.
In any event, I did have a wired option, I have a second adapter on this laptop that is wired, so I was able to connect up to the router using that nic, which incidentally was how I was sending messages on this list. Ultimately, I did get it working, and am now using it. I had forgotten the necessary step of rebooting after installing the firmward package in contrib, so the firmware didn't get uploaded. As a result, I thought it wasn't working (and started tramping around in things better left alone) when in fact all I needed to do is reboot. This of course made for a whole lot more work to get back to the virgin state and get the contrib package in again. I really need to be slapped, I think. :-[ 


--
JM
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