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[SOLVED] b43 wireless dropping connection wl doesnt work

Posted: 5. Aug 2013, 15:10
by blurymind
Hi, first of all I really like this distro and am hoping to stay with it for long. However, there is a problem!

My wireless card's model works like crap with the b43 driver. Salix does not seem to support the sta (wl) driver at all it seems. From all the search results everyone with wl was asked to move to b43.

So let me start by introducing my computer:

Code: Select all

root[tai2]# lspci -nn | grep -i broadcom
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:432b] (rev 01) 

Basically It connects successfully, but then after a while (minutes) it disconnects. At first I thought the problem was in wicd, so I replaced it with network manager. Unfortunately the problem did not go away. The network manager does not inform me it has disconnected, but there is no connection at all. So in order to reconnect I have to manually do it through wicd or network-manager (nm-applet) and reconnect. Since network manager requires less steps to reconnect, I decided to keep it as a replacement.
The connection does not slow down, it completely stops. This is unfortunately very annoying, and it pushed me to try the sta driver:
broadcom<dot>com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

I installed it with a slackbuild (sourcery) and it built just fine. So I modprobe -r b43 and then loaded wl instead. My wireless card is not being picked up by the network manager at all. wl loads fine, no errors,I even tried blacklisting b43- no luck.
So I had to move back to b43 and it's crappy connection.

What should I do? I tried disabling Ipv6- this doesnt seem to remedy the problem as well.
It ran just fine on ubuntu, but i really grew to hate ubuntu.

I made sure that this problem is not due poor wifi reception. My other laptop does not have this issue.

Re: b43 wireless dropping connection, wl doesnt even work

Posted: 5. Aug 2013, 22:14
by laprjns
Have you read this: http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.0/ ... adcom-sta/?
Slackbuild broadcom-sta README wrote:You may also want to create /etc/modprobe.d/b43_blacklist.conf and add the
following lines to it:
blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist bcma
blacklist ssb

Re: b43 wireless dropping connection, wl doesnt even work

Posted: 6. Aug 2013, 13:11
by blurymind
Hi, Thank you!!
I think this did it.
The sta driver is running after a reboot, instead of the crappy b43 driver. And the wifi dropping of connection stopped. I finally have a stable connection. :D

If I was in charge of that slackbuild, I'd tell it to add those rules during install.