Hi there, i am looking for a bit of advice on how to proceed with a wee problem that i am having. I have a BCM4306 pcmcia card (one of the later revisions) that i use to connect to my wpa2 wireless network. This is running on an old Dell Latitude (circa 1999). I used to use fedora (7,8 and then 9) on this but 2.6.23 and 2.6.25 stopped populating various bits of /proc/acpi with the relevant information for the cpu temp sensor to be read accurately (lm_sensors doesn't detect any sensors either in 2.x or 3.x) so i am reliant on the kernel to do the necessary magic. I had been using bcm43xx then b43 to access the card with the 4.x firmware from openwrt and all was good - speedy responsive etc
Got fed up with kernel updates attempting to fry the laptop as i after 2.6.23 i had to replace the mobo (opened bugzilla report, no action taken, not complaining coz hey it's a 440BX-M so is fairly unimportant in the overall scheme of things)
So, as every other box in the house now runs CentOS i installed that instead. dl'd the bcm43xx-fwcutter from Karanbir (thanks btw!) cut out the bits from the 3.x firmware from the link on linuxwireless.org, altered modprobe.conf etc.
Wireless now works but is *real slow* just for internet access (like minutes for pages to load). ssh, ping etc all good and quick
I am wondering if it is because of the old version of BCM43xx that is in the 2.6.18 kernel (never liked softMAC much) or if something else is going on. top occasionally shows me that Xorg is sometimes going to 70-80% of cpu useage.
The desktop is always really responsive and apart from the browsing issue which is upsetting my partner loads then CentOS sems ideal for this laptop.
I really don't want to go back to using ndiswrapper and wondered if anyone had any pointers other than using another box with which to ssh -Y firefox &
Am away from the laptop atm but if any further info is needed, dmesg, lspci etc then i will be able to provide them when i am home this evening (about 5hrs hence)
Thanks in advance
mike