I'm off with my family on holiday away from home, staying at my sister-in-law in Ohio. All I have with me is my company issued Dell laptop with Windows Xp. Surfing the net with the system locked up (no administrator privileges) is not a lot fun. So seeing that that there was a test version of Salix Live I though I download, burn a live cd and use it to keep in touch with the world. The results is that I am now connected via the laptop using Salix Live 13.1 and all seems to be working, Was a bit of a problem getting up and running, but nothing that can be directly attributed to Salix Live.
The first issue was burning the cd. Window Media Player cannot burn iso's and there is was no other burning software installed, so I had to burn the cd on my brother-in laws computer. Once burned I was able to pop the cd into the laptop and it booted (bios configuration is not locked on the computer!) up with out problems, It does seem to boot faster than past Salix Live cd that I've used.
The big problem was with wireless. It's a Dell laptop so it has a Broadcom BCM4312 chip set.
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root[one]# lspci -v | grep Broad
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)
So at boot up I was getting the following errors:
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b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/ucode15.fw
b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43-open/ucode15.fw
b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode15.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode15.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website
Not wanting to compile anything I decide to use ndiswrapper since I already had the windows driver on the laptop hard drive. Using ndigtk, I was able to install the window driver without problems. I then removed both the b43 and ssb modules (rmmod b43 ssb) and tried loading the ndiswrapper module, which promptly failed. modprobe couldn't find the ndiswrapper.ko module. Turns out that the module is in the wrong directory. I found it in /lib/modules/misc, but it needs to be in /lib/module/uname-r/ directory. Moving it there, and following a depmod -a, I was able to load the ndiswrapper module. Once loaded, Wicd had no problem finding the network and connecting.
Since there are other threads with Broadcom issues,I'll summarize what I did to get this working:
After installing the Windows driver (in my case bcmwl5.inf) using ndisgtk do the following in a terminal as root:
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root[one]# mv /lib/modules/misc/ /lib/modules/2.6.33.4-smp/
root[one]# depmod -a
root[one]# rmmod b43
root[one]# rmmod ssb
root[one]# modprobe ndiswrapper
As for this version of SalixLive, its working great and I haven't had any problems yet. I will continue to use it over the next couple of days and report back with any problems or issues.
Thanks
Rich