Wireless died

[John Jason Jordan]

I have a Compaq R3240 with Ubuntu Feisty, amd64 (upgraded from Edgy,
upgraded from Dapper, upgraded from Breezy, upgraded from Hoary. All
amd64, and ever since Hoary I have had my Broadcom 4306 working with
ndiswrapper. System is completely up to date.

Yesterday I was at the university and discovered that the wireless was
not working. It was as if the university's wireless network was down,
i.e., no signal. But everyone else in the room had no problems
connecting to the university wireless network. I tried various things,
but could not get it to see a signal. The previous time I used it was
two weeks earlier, and it worked fine then. I am at home now where I
use ethernet, but I can always still see signals from the neighbors.
However, something is still wrong because I do not see any signals at
all.

Here is what I did at the command line:

***@Devil5:~$ uname -a
Linux Devil5 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 19:00:28 UTC 2007
x86_64 GNU/Linux ***@Devil5:~$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
netbc564 : driver installed
device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
***@Devil5:~$ sudo ndiswrapper -v
utils version: 1.9
driver modinfo: could not open ndiswrapper: No such device
***@Devil5:~$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
***@Devil5:~$

I checked to make sure bcm43xx is still blacklisted, and it is.

I can't figure out why ndiswrapper -l shows everything is fine, but
ndiswrapper -v says there is no such device. I also do not understand
why ndiswrapper -l shows the bcm43xx as an alternate driver, when it is
blacklisted. I also get the following:

***@Devil5:~$ sudo modprobe bcm43xx
***@Devil5:~$ sudo rmmod bcm43xx
***@Devil5:~$ sudo modprobe bcm43xx
***@Devil5:~$

How can I modprobe a module that is blacklisted, and even after
removing it?

Is it possible that the Broadcom 4306 died? Considering the above, that
doesn't seem likely, but has anyone else ever had their Broadcom 4306
go to wireless heaven?

I hope someone has some suggestions, 'cause I'm out of ideas.

[Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas]

Post by John Jason Jordan
I have a Compaq R3240 with Ubuntu Feisty, amd64 (upgraded from Edgy,
upgraded from Dapper, upgraded from Breezy, upgraded from Hoary. All
amd64, and ever since Hoary I have had my Broadcom 4306 working with
ndiswrapper. System is completely up to date.
Yesterday I was at the university and discovered that the wireless was
not working. It was as if the university's wireless network was down,
i.e., no signal. But everyone else in the room had no problems
connecting to the university wireless network. I tried various things,
but could not get it to see a signal. The previous time I used it was
two weeks earlier, and it worked fine then. I am at home now where I
use ethernet, but I can always still see signals from the neighbors.
However, something is still wrong because I do not see any signals at
all.
Linux Devil5 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 19:00:28 UTC 2007
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
netbc564 : driver installed
device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
utils version: 1.9
driver modinfo: could not open ndiswrapper: No such device
I checked to make sure bcm43xx is still blacklisted, and it is.
I can't figure out why ndiswrapper -l shows everything is fine, but
ndiswrapper -v says there is no such device. I also do not understand
why ndiswrapper -l shows the bcm43xx as an alternate driver, when it is
How can I modprobe a module that is blacklisted, and even after
removing it?
Is it possible that the Broadcom 4306 died? Considering the above, that
doesn't seem likely, but has anyone else ever had their Broadcom 4306
go to wireless heaven?
I hope someone has some suggestions, 'cause I'm out of ideas.

--Most stupid question of all: Are you sure the wifi is physically on?
There is that button on the right-front corner, which turns the radio on
and off, regardless of OS. Did you try toggling that button to see if
the wifi sees any signal? Does 'lspci' list the wifi?

Ubuntu Feisty comes with a 2.6.20 kernel by default, which has the
bcm43xx drivers built in, which you blacklisted (you need to explicitly
enable them if you compile your own kernel). To make the BCM4306
"natively" functional, you need to load the right firmware via
'fwcutter'. I stopped using ndiswrapper about six months ago, when the
bcm43xx drivers became reliable.

On my R3240, I've found that I need to 'rmmod bcm43xx' and then
'modprobe bcm43xx' a couple of times and then issue a 'ifconfig wlan0
up' command (I do all this by hand; the "native" drivers want to make
the wifi show up as 'eth*', but using an appropriate entry in
'/etc/udev/rules.d/', I make it show up as wlan0, the way it used to
when I was using ndiswrapper, so I don't have to modify my firewall
scripts). When I had to use ndiswrapper, again I had to do several
rmmod/modprobe cycles before bringing up the wifi with an ifconfig.
After I upgraded my hard disk to 100GB 7200 rpm, I had hda1 destined for
WinXP, but I chose to install Ubuntu Feisty 64 bit to experiment with it
(my main distro is SuSE 10.2 and I have some issues with Feisty, but
that's another topic). I observed that after I installed the BCM
firmware via fwcutter, Feisty brought up the wifi and obtained an IP
address from a nearby network, without me knowing that!!!!! I had to
explicitly blacklist bcm43xx to prevent this unpleasant surprise.

So, you may try to bring up the wifi manually, toggling the hardware
switch. To ask the wifi what networks it sees, you may issue a 'iwlist
wlan0 scanning'. You don't need an IP address to scan. If it works and
you spot a network you like, you can then obtain an IP address by
issuing 'dhcpcd wlan0' or 'dhcpcd3-client wlan0'.

That's my five cents worth of wisdom. I have to say I have not been
happy with this laptop. I get the impression that the hardware in this
laptop is on the "hairy edge," as if it has not been designed right.
For example, the built-in ethernet adapter sometimes shows up as eth0,
some other times as eth2 (the /etc/udev/rules.d have reserved eth1),
sometimes eth3, and I have even seen it come up as eth4!!!! I am
looking forward to the Thinkpad T61p, with the Intel Core2 Duo "Santa
Rosa" (64-bit dual core) processor.

c.f.

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 07 Jul 2007 02:50:55 -0400

Post by Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas

Post by John Jason Jordan
I hope someone has some suggestions, 'cause I'm out of ideas.

--Most stupid question of all: Are you sure the wifi is physically on?
There is that button on the right-front corner, which turns the radio on
and off, regardless of OS. Did you try toggling that button to see if
the wifi sees any signal? Does 'lspci' list the wifi?

Omigod. That's all it was! Now I'm going to have to return my degree,
because clearly I am too stupid to be entitled to it.

OK, in my defense, that button never worked before. Must be one of the
recent upgrades that enabled it.

I agree with the quality of the R3240. I've had a lot of physical
problems caused by bad design. It's easy to catch a fingernail under a
keycap and pop it off, and there's no way to get it back on again. And
the hard drive connector sits too low so the drive connector doesn't
engage fully. On the other hand, I got a lot of computer for the money
and, except for wireless, Ubuntu autoconfigured everything perfectly.

I figure another year for this computer, but then I'm looking seriously
at the new Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. It should be pretty nice
after you trick it out with extra goodies. But the T61p is pretty sweet
too.

Thanks for the help!