Thanks ill try this! Cavan On 7/7/07, Barak A. Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have a shiny new Dell Inspiron 1501 running Debian amd64 stable. The easy way to make the Broadcom WiFi stuff work is: (a) You need a newer kernel than the 2.6.18 in stable, so echo "deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get install linux-image-amd64/etch-backports This kernel includes a reverse-engineered free driver, bcm43xx, which should load automatically at boot time. (b) Unfortunately the free (as in speech) driver needs a proprietary firmware image to initialize the device. This needs to be fetched. The distasteful process is, however, automated. Make sure you have "contrib" in the sources.list line for the main Debian mirror, then go apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter this will download material from broadcom and extract the actual firmware into a bunch of files in /lib/firmware/. If it doesn't, invoke dpkg-reconfigure bcm43xx-fwcutter and answer "y" when it asks if it should download the firmware. Or if that doesn't work, read /usr/share/doc/bcm43xx-fwcutter/README.Debian (c) Reboot into your new >= 2.6.21 kernel. Everything should work (d) ... except that the wireless interface will stop working upon resumption from hibernation because the firmware needs to be reloaded. Fix by adding two lines to /etc/hibernate/common.conf UnloadModules bcm43xx and DownInterfaces eth1 If you have a problem, be sure you're booting into the newer kernel and do "dmesg|less" and search for bcm. It should have cheerful messages about 4 cores and firmware revision and radio off and stuff like that, rather than sad messages about not loading firmware. Also when you invoke "iwconfig eth1" it should look all happy. -- Barak A. Pearlmutter Hamilton Institute & Dept Comp Sci, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/