Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
So...if you had a clean slate, which make & model would you buy for mindlessly easy installation and use under CentOS 5.3?
Dave
Maybe you can try an intel based USB or PCMCIA card for your son and give it a try. I had my CentOS 5.2 work with an Intel based card which was inbuilt on the Laptop. I believe with the new Kernel in CentOS 5.3 you should have a good chance of getting it to work.
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 3:38 PM, David McGuffey davidmcguffey@verizon.netwrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
So...if you had a clean slate, which make & model would you buy for mindlessly easy installation and use under CentOS 5.3?
Dave
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
David McGuffey wrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
For USB, you will almost for sure have to use the NDIS wrapper driver. I have not tried it, been shying away from it for at least a year now. I believe it is built into FC11, so will be part of Centos 6 at some date off in the future ;)
PCMCIA or miniPCI is more promising. You can use the DKMS driver (?) for say madwifi, and be quite satisfied with the results.
You say that the current wifi is 'builtin'. Is that on the board or a miniPCI? If the later, pull it out and put in something supported.
So...if you had a clean slate, which make & model would you buy for mindlessly easy installation and use under CentOS 5.3?
Dave
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 08:28:49AM -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
David McGuffey wrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
For USB, you will almost for sure have to use the NDIS wrapper driver. I have not tried it, been shying away from it for at least a year now. I believe it is built into FC11, so will be part of Centos 6 at some date off in the future ;)
I was recently snooping around on amazon and newegg looking at wireless cards for desktop machines. I was specifically reading customer reviews that mentioned Linux. There were a number of them that reportedly worked on Linux, and most of them used an (older, I think) ralink chipset that appars to have drivers on Centos 5 (at least there is a kernel module by that name) and which the reviewers said that it "just worked".
Most of the ones I was looking at were PCI cards, which won't help you if you're looking for something for a laptop, but I also recall seeing some USB models that also claimed to work on linux.
Good luck!
PCMCIA or miniPCI is more promising. You can use the DKMS driver (?) for say madwifi, and be quite satisfied with the results.
You say that the current wifi is 'builtin'. Is that on the board or a miniPCI? If the later, pull it out and put in something supported.
So...if you had a clean slate, which make & model would you buy for mindlessly easy installation and use under CentOS 5.3?
Dave
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:31:33 -0400 fred smith wrote:
David McGuffey wrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
Why not look at a small access point that plugs into the RJ45 and uses USB for power? DLink DWL-G730AP or other equivalent.
Julian Thomas wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:31:33 -0400 fred smith wrote:
David McGuffey wrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
Why not look at a small access point that plugs into the RJ45 and uses USB for power? DLink DWL-G730AP or other equivalent.
If it really is an AP, it won't do the job, as an AP cannot be a client to another AP. 802.11 DOES have the concept of a wireless backbone, called WDS (wireless distribution system), but it is not yet defined (Work In Progress: 802.11s, I am a contributor to the security features). So each vendor has its own WDS implementation (MIT's OnePC implements part of draft 1 of 802.11s).
Of course there are devices out there that are referred to as wireless bridges (Linksys WRT54g is one) that act as a client and bridges an ethernet as a single client to the AP. Note that a wireless bridge is NOT an AP. Of course there are probably devices out there that can be configured either way....
Note, I work on the 802.11 standards and know them well, but I don't know of all the flavors of implementations out in the wild.
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 17:06 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Julian Thomas wrote:
Why not look at a small access point that plugs into the RJ45 and uses USB for power? DLink DWL-G730AP or other equivalent.
If it really is an AP, it won't do the job, as an AP cannot be a client to another AP. 802.11 DOES have the concept of a wireless backbone, called WDS (wireless distribution system), but it is not yet defined (Work In Progress: 802.11s, I am a contributor to the security features). So each vendor has its own WDS implementation (MIT's OnePC implements part of draft 1 of 802.11s).
Of course there are devices out there that are referred to as wireless bridges (Linksys WRT54g is one) that act as a client and bridges an ethernet as a single client to the AP. Note that a wireless bridge is NOT an AP. Of course there are probably devices out there that can be configured either way....
Note, I work on the 802.11 standards and know them well, but I don't know of all the flavors of implementations out in the wild.
At least when running the Tomato Firmware, the Linksys WRT54GL (L = linux) and WRT54G versions 4 and earlier (also linux-based) run WDS as hosts/clients very effectively. I run several GLs as access points across my lan with 0-2 more as WDS clients as needed.
As a side note, Tomato Firmware allows you to adjust transmitter power up to 6 times the normal level and that has let me go through some very think brick walls to pick up remote network cameras.
I should point out that both the host (access point) and client need to be WRT54G/L routers for the above scenarios to work. As RM said, WDS is vendor dependent.
Steve
On Fri, 19 Jun 2009, S.Tindall wrote:
As a side note, Tomato Firmware allows you to adjust transmitter power up to 6 times the normal level and that has let me go through some very think brick walls to pick up remote network cameras.
We have to see what the result of that is on any offspring :-D
At Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:38:03 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
So...if you had a clean slate, which make & model would you buy for mindlessly easy installation and use under CentOS 5.3?
Most of the 'embeded' wireless cards are actually mini-PCI cards. If you could beg/borrow/steal an Intel ipw2100 or ipw2200 mini-PCI card and swap that in you would have a completly painless wifi solution. I don't know of any current model PCMCIA cards that will be as painless. You might find an older Prism-type card on E-Bay -- those cards are pretty close to painless.
Dave
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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Dag Wieers -
David McGuffey -
fred smith -
Julian Thomas -
Mfawa Alfred Onen -
Robert Heller -
Robert Moskowitz -
S.Tindall