Wlan desperation on 12.04 live-usb

[bennypr0fane]

Hello,
I'm close to giving up my plans of installing 12.04, because I can't get my wlan chip to work.
It's a Broadcom b43225, and I've tried lots of things already.
The same chip works under Bodhi Linux 1.4, which is based on Ubuntu (currently 10.04). To make it work under Bodhi, I had to remove and blacklist the b43 legacy driver and install the proprietary STA driver instead.

I am now trying Ubuntu 12.04 ON A LIVE-USB, NOT INSTALLED yet
(sorry for yelling that, but it tends to get overlooked in all my support requests).
When I first started it, the STA driver was immediately suggested by Jockey and I loaded it, but no luck. The nm-applet says wireless disabled , and it's greyed out and can't be enabled by clicking it.

I already went to #ubuntu channel on IRC and was instructed to remove and blacklist the STA driver and go back to the legacy one instead (b43- fwcutter and b43-firmware-installer), which I did and it didn't help. I found the same instructions in the Wiki of Ubuntuusers.de
When I restart the nm service,
nm-applet gets wireless enabled, but it says device unavailable. That's actually the only thing that achieves a change to nm-applet.

Now over at Bodhi they made this really cool script for diagnosing wireless, and it prints the results in a neat file I'd like you to look at:

http://pastebin.com/1pEAkmeC

Maybe you find some new clues for me?

thanks, Ben

[bkratz]

Looking at your pastebin results shows that you are actually trying to connect with

1. 01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43225 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4357] (rev 01)
2. Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. T77H103.00 Wireless Half-size Mini PCIe Card [105b:e021]
3. Kernel driver in use: brcmsmac

not wl or b43 or anything else you have tried.


As a temporary trial ( if will return on reboot) you might try



sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb brcmsmac wl

sudo modprobe wl

and see what you get. If it works we will blacklist the brcmsmac driver
to make it permanent. If not harm-no foul. It will "fix" itself (go back
how it was) at the next reboot.

[bennypr0fane]

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb brcmsmac wl
FATAL: Module wl not found.
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe wl
FATAL: Module wl not found.

no luck

sudo modprobe wl in fact I already tried at some point, but without doing anything about the brcmsmac first

[bennypr0fane]

This is now about installed Lubuntu 12.04 on this same machine.

I modified these commands like this:

sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb brcmsmac

 sudo modprobe b43

Not my idea, but Tara@Bodhilinux suggested it.
This finally made my WiFi-spring to life!

Results of the wireless diagnose script now look like this: http://pastebin.com/XAXAuD44

However It's still behaving funny: After startup, WiFi s always deactivated by the hardware switch (Fn+F3 on my keyboard). I have to press the combo twice to make it start. Also it takes like 10 seconds before it does.

- Now I think the driver I need to use for perfectly normal operation of my Wifi (I haven't given up hope yet) is either b43 or the proprietary broadcom sta driver that was offered to use by Jockey right after I first installed Lubuntu. Please tell me if that is correct?
- However, the driver in use right now is "wl", according to (I think) lshw:

01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43225 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4357] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. T77H103.00 Wireless Half-size Mini PCIe Card [105b:e021]
	Kernel driver in use: wl

When I go to main menu > settings > additional drivers, the broadcom STA proprietary driver is shown active and in use.
I'm not sure if that is the name of that proprietary driver module or something else. How can I find out the name of that module?

- In the /etc/modprobe.d directory I have a file called blacklist-bcm43.conf. It contains the following list:

# Warning: This file is autogenerated by bcmwl. All changes to this file will be lost.
blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist ssb
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist brcm80211
blacklist brcmfmac
blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist bcma

Does this mean all the listed modules are blacklisted? If so, should I try removing b43 from the list?

- rfkill list looks like this:

$ rfkill list
0: brcmwl-0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
1: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no

I'm confused by the name of the device being brcmwl. Is that the name of the driver module now? Before I did that modprobe, it was named something else.

Am I making any sense?
To sum it up, my goal is for the WiFi to switch on at startup, not start as "blocked by hardware switch", not take a long time to react when switched on, and not to go away when I close the lid!