[SOLVED] Broadcom WIFI Problems

[linuxero]

Hi Mageians;

Back from vacation and while enjoying my holidays I couldn't keep away from Mageia, so a few posts hoping to get some help

Lately I am installing mageia on laptops many of which have Broadcom Wifi cards that need bcmxxxx. I am facing two problems;

1. When Mageia detects the card it seems to create two interfaces for the wifi connection, one called eth1 and the other wlan0 or wlan 1, this is causing a problem later when I install the non-free packages needed. I cannot connect using wifi until I have deleted ifcfg-eth1 and ifcfg-wlanx. Why does it create the wlan interface when it is going to use eth1 eventually?

2. On one of these laptops - HP Pavilion dv2000 - wifi card has a button to activate/desactivate it. Mageia cannot connect and claims a problem with the card.
I booted PC-BSD 9 Isotope on the same laptop and it can use the card and connect to Internet. I noted, though, that PC-BSD sometimes says something about the RF Key of the card. I guess it is some kind of soft key or button. Is there a newer version of the firmware/driver for these cards that Mageia is not using or should I tweak something in the module configuration somewhere to get around this?

By the way; Zorin 6 has no problem activating the connection on this very same laptop but I cannot find the module configuration to compare it to Mageia's.

Thanks in advance.

[tom_]

one problem one post, please.
otherwise it will be hard to have clear discussion about one problem

Hi Mageians;

Back from vacation and while enjoying my holidays I couldn't keep away from Mageia, so a few posts hoping to get some help

Lately I am installing mageia on laptops many of which have Broadcom Wifi cards that need bcmxxxx. I am facing two problems;

1. When Mageia detects the card it seems to create two interfaces for the wifi connection, one called eth1 and the other wlan0 or wlan 1, this is causing a problem later when I install the non-free packages needed. I cannot connect using wifi until I have deleted ifcfg-eth1 and ifcfg-wlanx. Why does it create the wlan interface when it is going to use eth1 eventually?

are you using Gnome or KDE?
are you sure you not running more ore network management system (please run

Code: Select all

ps afx | grep -i net

)?
if not, please open a bug report

[tom_]

2. On one of these laptops - HP Pavilion dv2000 - wifi card has a button to activate/desactivate it. Mageia cannot connect and claims a problem with the card.
I booted PC-BSD 9 Isotope on the same laptop and it can use the card and connect to Internet. I noted, though, that PC-BSD sometimes says something about the RF Key of the card. I guess it is some kind of soft key or button. Is there a newer version of the firmware/driver for these cards that Mageia is not using or should I tweak something in the module configuration somewhere to get around this?

By the way; Zorin 6 has no problem activating the connection on this very same laptop but I cannot find the module configuration to compare it to Mageia's.

check if the file /etc/modprobe.d/hp_wmi.conf has a line like

options hp_wmi wireless=1

if not, add it and reboot (tip from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1775555&page=2 )

[linuxero]

one problem one post, please.
otherwise it will be hard to have clear discussion about one problem

are you using Gnome or KDE?
are you sure you not running more ore network management system (please run

Code: Select all

ps afx | grep -i net

)?
if not, please open a bug report

Ok one per one

I am using KDE and I am only using Mageia's network configuration. I never use anything else.

I'll try the tip with the links you mentioned, and report back, thanks

[linuxero]

As I had previously installed Zorin over Mageia, now I reinstalled Mageia again, weird that upon the installation has terminated the Network Centre showed wlan0, but then I deleted ifcfg-wlan0. In the network centre, wlan0 still appeared..! After installing the firmware this time, the connection worked smoothly and wlan0 disappeared from the Network Centre.

Sorry i cannot reproduce the error on this machine.

Thank you anyway.

[linuxero]

Hi;

Jus after updating the kernel it seems that there was a problem again. wlan0 appeared again and the connection failed! I had to remove all the broadcom related packages, delete wlan0 and reinstall broadcom packages for the new kernel. Only then, the connection came back.

I guess there is a slight bug regarding BCM43xx NICs.

Just updating the thread