Anybody know anything about linux networking?

Cuchulain · 5 Jan 2008 at 17:49

I'm having some trouble setting up wireless networking on Mandriva, don't know if anyone is able to shed any light on it for me.

On bootup it automatically configures itself with the BCM43XX firmware and the connection comes up ok but I can't get any traffic in or out.

I downloaded the latest windows driver and manually configured ndiswrapper using bcmwl5.inf and the connection worked perfectly.

I then assumed that all I had to do was blacklist bcm43xx in modprobe.conf and it would automatically boot up using ndiswrapper with the windows driver, unfortunately it didn't and I wasn't able to set up ndiswrapper manually either until I unblacklisted bcm43xx and rebooted, which then took me back to square one!

Any ideas how I can automatically configure ndiswrapper for my wireless connection?

Thanks

leezer3 · 6 Jan 2008 at 21:25

Hiya,
In many cases, wireless isn't one of Mandriva's strengths I'm afraid.

The basis of the trouble is that while the GUI tools are normally useful, they have a nasty habit of interfering with things. Your problem is that the GUI tool knows there's a native driver available, & so refuses to use anything else. Couldn't tell you how to disable it though- I'd suggest you post at http://www.mandrivausers.org & see what they say.

-Leezer-

FooAtari · 6 Jan 2008 at 22:22

I've got a laptop with that chipset, pain in the ass...

Some distributions seems to like it better than others even though they all use Ndiswrapper. I got it working fairly painlessly with PCLinuxOS and also with Linux Mint although it required a little more configuring. Currently using Linux mint but can only get WEP (combined with access control on router) working, cant connect at all with WPA. But was able to use WPA in PCLOS.

PCLOS is KDE based so worth giving that a shot if you are using Mandriva at the moment. It's a nice distribution.

AndrewP · 7 Jan 2008 at 09:43

Cuchulain said:
On bootup it automatically configures itself with the BCM43XX firmware and the connection comes up ok but I can't get any traffic in or out.

I had the same problem with my dad's laptop (4318 I think, a Dell) on a Fedora LiveCD, it wasn't using the right library files. I had to download a newer Windows driver, cut the files out and add them to /usr/lib/firmware then reload the module (something like that, don't have the files here to check).

There was another module to blacklist as well, b43 - check if that's loaded?