Help With Wireless (Please)

[JokersLoose]

Hello All,

OK, I have a linksys WMP54g wireless adapter in my system. Installed Kubuntu 7.10 and it asked if I wanted to load the drivers. Worked like a charm. Got up one day and nothing, zero. I had to hard wire it. Now If I look in KInfocenter I see the card. "Network Interfaces" shows an IP Address and such for eth1. "PCI" shows my "Network controller" as a Broadcom Corp. BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03). Now this has been going on for a few days, but we have changed routers and of course the WEP code, when I open my network manager it will not let me change to the new code. And if I unplug the ethernet cord it tell me No active device. The light on the card is on. "iwconfig" tells me

eth1 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:"Jimmy" Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
Mode:Managed Frequency=2.472 GHz Access Point: Invalid
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm
RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Link Quality=0/100 Signal level=-256 dBm Noise level=-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

So I couldn't figure it out, so I just did a fresh install (haven't been running long enough to worry about anything "important" on the hard drive) thinking "Hey it worked the first time I installed, so just re-install and it "should" come back up. But nothing. When I right click on the icon in my system tray I don't even have a wireless network option. But if I go to "optoins" I do have a "disable wireless" But it's not reading any wireless signals.

Could the card be bad and it still show up in my system? All of this started after a power outage. So was wondering if just "maybe" my adapter went bad , but the system is still "seeing" it.

Thanks for any help.

James

[jglen490]

Re: Help With Wireless (Please)

Are you using ndiswrapper?

I tried that when I first loaded 7.10 because it worked reasonably well with my Broadcomm 4318-based wifi card. I beat my self up trying every trick I could think of to make it work - but it just laughed at me.

Finally, I went to Adept and installed the bcm43xx-fwcutter package. It downloaded, installed, and very politely asked if I wanted to install the firmware, too. I answered Yes and afew moments later my wifi card lit up like a Christmas tree. Been working fine since.

The Broadcom based cards are tricky and stubborn. Give fw cutter a try.

[JokersLoose]

Re: Help With Wireless (Please)

I went to Adept and installed the bcm43xx-fwcutter package.

Checked and it's already installed. What gets me is it just stopped working one day. Which leads me to think it's the card itself. And not the OS. But I have it hard wired for now.

Thanks,
James

[jglen490]

Re: Help With Wireless (Please)

Try going into Adept and asking for a reinstall on the bcm43xx-fwcutter package. I don't know why it just stop working, unless some update broke it. Just a guess.

[JokersLoose]

Re: Help With Wireless (Please)

Nope. Still nothing. It will not even let me change the WEP code in network manager. It's like it's locked or something.

James

[jglen490]

Re: Help With Wireless (Please)

Sorry. Sounds like some weird permissions thing. Of course that doesn't explain what could have changed the state of the program.

[JokersLoose]

Re: Help With Wireless (Please)

Yeah, it's acting weird. It doesn't "see" it in the icon on my desktop. It "sees" it in things like lspci and such. When I open network manager it shows a wireless card active on eth1. But it will not let me change the WEP code. Heck even after a fresh re-install it still isn't working. Which leads me to think the card has gone bad.

Thanks for the advice.

James