Void's Forums

hmmm.. after a week of searching and experimenting ive come to ask if anyone would know anything about my wireless problem.
I have a broadcom 9431. I installed the latest NdisWrapper, got the corressponding windows driver (bcmw15).

I did a
# ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmw15 driver present, hardware present
# modprobe ndiswrapper

and then when i try iwconfig (*i have the wireless-tool installed) it says i have no wireless extensions and there is no wlan0 (if i try ifconfig wlan0).

According the the forums and howtos ive read that should have worked for this card.
I'm running SuSE10
Any ideas?

Why not use YaST instead of iwconfig?

tried that, same thing.

What .sys file is in the windows driver pack?

bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf are the driver files i got from acer

The ndiswrapper wiki reccomends these drivers:
ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/noteboo ... 80211g.zip

Give them a whirl.

Is this a built-in card? If not I would swap it out for an Atheros based card and then you can just use the open madwifi drivers. That's all I use. If it's built-in I can understand you wanting to get it working.

it is builtin wireless, but i may resort to buying a card. I tried those drivers and everything went the same. I do have some messages in /var/log/messages:

kernel: ndiswrapper: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
kernel: ndiswrapper: version 1.3rc1 laded
kernel: ndiswrapper: (check_nt_hdr:156): Windowes driver is not 64-bit; bad magic; 010B
kernel: ndiswrapper:(load_sys_files:481): unable to prepare driver 'bcmwl5'
kernel: ndiswrapper: (ndiswrapper_load_driver:93): loadndiswrapper failed (6); check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver'
ifstatus: Interface wlan0 is not available
ifstatus: Interface wlan0 is not available
ifstatus: Interface wlan0 is not available
ifstatus: Interface wlan0 is not available

Is this a 64 bit machine you're running? If you do go with a card I have 3 Linksys WPC55AG cards that I really like. They are a little pricey (about $100 USD in a store) but they work very well. Not all Linksys cards are Atheros based so if you don't buy that exact model you would have to do some research. The card will do A/B/G. And of course I like the WRT54G and WRT54GS for wireless routers. They run Linux and I have customized mine pretty heavily. You can pick them up for about 50 bucks. I even have a web server running on one:

http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net:8100/

i got my wireless card working on wlan1 somehow... im really not sure.. it started working after restoring my partitions from images.

I had it connected to my network earlier getting a response from the dhcp server on my router. But now for some reason all i get is a timeout while waiting for a dhcp response. I know the network is working fine (my desktop computers are recieving dhcp responses fine and such) Any idea about this inconsistency?

Master of Reality wrote:i got my wireless card working on wlan1 somehow... im really not sure.. it started working after restoring my partitions from images.

I had it connected to my network earlier getting a response from the dhcp server on my router. But now for some reason all i get is a timeout while waiting for a dhcp response. I know the network is working fine (my desktop computers are recieving dhcp responses fine and such) Any idea about this inconsistency?

are you sure that your encryption key is set as the proper type... such as hexadecimal or ASCII. Make sure you dont have it set as "passphrase" because that is just used to generate the key. Check your router, but if its 26 characters it is probably a 128 bit hexadecimal encryption key

oh my you're completely right, i must have changed it to passphrase sometime in my screwing around with it. I tried ASCII, but i didnt even think it was hexadecimal. So after changing it to a hexadecimal type it works fine now. You're a genius.

Not only that but you're a "super" genius. :)

What?
He's talking to himself.

I'm drunk.