Help with Broadcom Wireless

[Eraser]

Hello,

I just got a new laptop and I installed Fedora 6 x86_64 on it.

I have everything working except the wireless. I have been trying to set it up with ndiswrapper since, from what I heard, it is faster than using the bcm43xx driver. I searched around the web for a solution but came back empty.

Here is the relevant line in lspci:

01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)

I have been following the instructions at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation

Everything goes fine until I try to load the module. According to the instructions in the above URL, I should see a message similar to the following when loading the module:

"ndiswrapper version <version> loaded"

Instead, I see this:

Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper version 1.25 loaded (preempt=no,smp=yes)
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMSetBusData'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisAllocateMdl'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisFreeMdl'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisFreeNetBufferList'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisAllocateNetBufferAndNetBufferList'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMOidRequestComplete'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMDeregisterInterruptEx'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisAllocateMemoryWithTagPriority'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMSendNetBufferListsComplete'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisAllocateIoWorkItem'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMRegisterInterruptEx'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisOpenConfigurationEx'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMIndicateReceiveNetBufferLists'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda loadndisdriver: loadndisdriver: load_driver(361): couldn't load driver bcmwl6
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisQueueIoWorkItem'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisFreeNetBufferListPool'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMGetBusData'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMSetMiniportAttributes'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMRegisterMiniportDriver'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisAllocateNetBufferListPool'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMIndicateStatusEx'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisFreeIoWorkItem'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMSynchronizeWithInterruptEx'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMDeregisterScatterGatherDma'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMRegisterScatterGatherDma'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (import:245): unknown symbol: NDIS.SYS:'NdisMDeregisterMiniportDriver'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (load_sys_files:215): couldn't prepare driver 'bcmwl6'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: ndiswrapper (load_wrap_driver:120): loadndiswrapper failed (65280); check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver'
Mar 3 17:54:17 yoda kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver ndiswrapper

The laptop in question is an Pavilion dv2221us. I downloaded the Windows 64 bit drivers for both Vista and XP 64 with the same results. The drivers can be found at: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?product=3347727&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&submit.y=0&submit.x=0&lang=en&cc=us

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Eraser

[Eraser]

A couple more things I forgot to mention, might or might not be relevant.

output of uname -a:

Linux yoda 2.6.19-1.2911.6.4.fc6 #1 SMP Sat Feb 24 14:03:48 EST 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I installed ndiswrapper and the ndiswrapper kernel module from the livna repository. The exact versions installed, according to "yum list" are:

kmod-ndiswrapper.x86_64 1.25-1.2.6.19_1.2911.6
ndiswrapper.x86_64 1.25-1.lvn6

Thanks again for any help.
Eraser

[Eraser]

Update: I tried downloading and compiling the latest stable ndiswrapper from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93482 (current latest stable version is 1.38).

Unfortunately I still ran into the same problem :(

[Eraser]

I just tried using the latest test ndiswrapper version (1.36rc1), still no luck.

[Eraser]

Good news, I got past that point. I found a driver at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp33001-33500/sp33008.exe that loaded properly.

I'll report if I can actually get it to work later.

[Eraser]

Good news, I got the wireless to work with the above driver. For some reason I am losing the settings for mode, key and essid on reboot. I'm probably missing something simple. I'll google around and hopefully come with a solution.

For the time being I just wrote a simple shell script that sets the correct values for iwconfig and starts the wireless interface.

Eraser

[Eraser]

Turns out I had a typo in the WEP encryption key, once I fixed that the wireless came up automatically on boot.

FYI, to fix the WEP key, I had to edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-wlan0.

there is a line starting with KEY=

the value after the equal sign was incorrect. This probably could have been fixed by running the graphical network configuration tool (system-config-network) but I was following instructions I found on the web, that's why I did it the "hard" way.

In any case, I'm very happy that I have my laptop working 100% with Fedora. I hope this thread can help others with similar problems.

Eraser