Wireless capabilities not always being detected

[joellynn]

I have a problem I hope that someone can help me diagnose. I have a Dell Vostro 1500 laptop with Fedora 12 and KDE 4.4.5 installed. I set it up so that it is a dual boot machine with Windows XP professional as the other operating system. About 40% of the time when I start the computer in Linux, the wireless card is apparently not detected. That is, the NetworkManager Applet lists only "Wired Network: disconnected" when I left click on it. It is as if I do not have a wireless card. Now, I'm relatively sure the wireless card is good for two reasons. 1) I replaced it just a year ago after the original really did go bad. 2) The computer never fails to detect it when started in Windows. One of the difficulties of diagnosing the problem is that it is intermittent. I cannot, at will, make it happen. My only solution when it does happen is to restart several times until it is, at last, detected. One curious and possibly relevant piece of information is that it seems more likely to be detected if I use su shutdown -r now, rather than some other restart method. I will sometimes go for a week without the problem, and sometimes it happens for days in a row.

What I would really like is a way to know why the wireless card wasn't detected, and to force it to be detected from within Fedora without having to restart and cross my fingers.

Any ideas suggestions? Here is some hopefully relevant output from sudo lspci -v. Is there other information that would be useful to help diagnose the problem?

0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1395 WLAN Mini-Card
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
        Memory at f9ffc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [58] Vendor Specific Information: Len=78 <?>
        Capabilities: [e8] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [d0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel
        Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number a7-71-e6-ff-ff-c6-0c-ee
        Capabilities: [16c] Power Budgeting <?>
        Kernel driver in use: wl
        Kernel modules: wl, ssb

Joel

[jpollard]

It might be time to upgrade.

It is possible it is a power management problem where the device doesn't fully power down to get a reset.

Will it work with a complete power off (10 seconds or more before applying power)?

[joellynn]

Thanks for responding jpollard. Ah, an upgrade would be fantastic, but - being a graduate student - it might not be in the cards for a little while. The worst-case scenario seems to be that every now and then I have to spend 10 minutes restarting before I get wireless capabilities. This obviously isn't exactly efficient but, I'll live with it if there's no other solution.

To answer your question specifically, the amount of time off doesn't seem to make a difference. For example, this morning I got into work after having the computer off all night. I powered on, and no wireless. This time I got lucky, and just once of su shutdown -r now and the wireless was up and running.

Rereading my response, I realize maybe I don't know what you mean by upgrade. Did you mean a hardware upgrade, as in a new computer? Or are you suggesting that I need a newer version of Fedora or KDE or the Linux kernel?

Joel

[AlexDudko]

I saw a bug on this issue (can't find it unfortunately) two years ago. I had the same problem on my old laptop. It was stated there it was a hardware rather than software issue and it was closed.

[jpollard]

I was meaning a software upgrade. Try one of the Fedora 14 spins (since you use KDE, I suggest that one). I believe they are available as a live CD kit. If it works with that, then the upgrade should work.

[joellynn]

I see. I'm a little hesitant to upgrade. I've only been using Linux for just under a year. Ha. It has taken me about that long to get things working the way I want them. I also have a lot of numerical packages for Fortran installed. I assume that upgrading would essentially mean starting over. Is there a good place to go for reference on how to upgrade?

[jpollard]

The amount of difficulty depends on how you have the installation.

A normal upgrade from Fedora 12 to 14 (my recommendation due to the problems with 15) is the "preupgrade" path. Basically, you install a package "preupgrade" and then run it. One of the issues it has is that it requires a fair amount of space in /boot (600MB), but if you have a LOT of packages installed, it can require 750MB.

If you have your /home directory tree on a separate partition, then you can make a backup of it and do a full install on /boot and the root filesystem, then remount the home partition.

If your numerical packages were installed in /usr/local or /opt then you can make a backup of these two directory trees (and any needed configuration files) for a reinstall. This is not usually needed for a "preupgrade" procedure, but a backup is a good idea in any case.

Sometimes (depending on how they are linked) there can be library issues. The application can be linked to use a specific version of the runtime library. This can cause issues that require a relinking (which is user level "reinstall" of the application), or an updated binary from whatever vendor/project it came from.

There is, however, an alternative - but it depends on how familiar you are with compiling/installing kernels. Because it appears to be a driver issue, you should be able to download a current Linux kernel and use that instead. This will get you the updated drivers without having to replace the rest of the system. It doesn't always work, there may be some missing packages you need to build the kernel. I'm not sure if they weren't automatically installed, or you got them as part of a development package installation. I think this would be the minimal impact on your system. Directions for building the kernel are included in the tarball. One step that isn't there is to make a copy of your current (operational) kernel configuration file (/boot/config-<whichever>) and put it in .config (where you put the source tree). When you run make config/menuconfig/... to configure the kernel, it will then only need updates to questions not answered in the .config. For the most part, just accept the default responses. This will set the configuration that matches your current system, and ignore the things you don't use, and set things appropriately that didn't exist before.

The "preupgrade" path is documented in

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_PreUpgrade

and indicates that you should already have the preupgrade package.

A full install can be done via DVD (backup first). If you want Fedora 14 then it is available from one of the repositories, documentation at

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...llation_Guide/

One other note: the "preupgrade" path will take you to Fedora 15. Some people think it works better, others (like me) don't. It uses Gnome3, which is a drastic alteration to the desktop, and a drastic alteration how things get started/shutdown (there are still issues there). Desktops seem to work, server configurations... not so much. It CAN work, it seems, but is tricky to get working.

[AlexDudko]

Don't you have such message in logs:

unable to enumerate USB device on port 2

There was a bug about this case and the main complaint should be about the hardware.

[joellynn]

In the end, I never quite figured out what was going wrong. I did find a way to deal with it more efficiently: when the wireless wasn't working, I typed "sudo modprobe -r b43", gave it a minute and then "sudo modprobe b43". So, I essentially "removed" the wireless driver and "reinserted" it. This always worked. But I honestly never cleared up why it was necessary in the first place. Since then I've moved on to Fedora 17 and new hardware, so I no longer suffer this problem.

[rgaelzer]

If you ever manage to upgrade your system, you can try and follow the detailed instructions in this thread (if you haven't already done so):

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=239922

Perchance they'll work for F12 as well...