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Okay, I've attempted to get wireless working on my (Gentoo 1.4) notebook, |
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but was faced with many, many problems. I'll enumerate them: |
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1. After installing almost all possible driver combinations and following all howtos i could find, i finally found |
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out the Dell has changed the chipset of their true mobile mini-pci cards from a cardbus-bridge+orinocco to a broadcom |
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BCM94301MP minipci card. |
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(about 6:00 hours) |
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2. After several hours of googling through the web in search for drivers i finally found broadcoms product brief on this chipset |
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There they say "Software Support: Embedded drivers for Linux(R) and VxWorks(R) operating systems" |
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(about 2:00 hours) |
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3. After months of waiting for informationon on this "embedded driver" to appear anywhere in the net or for a reply mail from broadcom about this |
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stuff, i let purchase an external AP with web-configuration, and placed it on an additional ethernet card of my router-pc, |
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set it open without WEP encryption or restriction, sealed the ethernet-card from the rest of the world via iptables and wrote some shell |
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script daemons and php web frontend scripts, to make people login via browser and then being able to access the net :-) |
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(about 3 months idle waiting and 6 hours configuring) |
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4. After testing the configuration with my laptop on the routers ethernet card instead of the AP, i have the configuration finnished and am still |
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waiting for drivers for this damn card, or at least chip-specifications to start writing some, or anything. i wrote another email to broadcom |
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for specifications since i didnt get any answer last time. |
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The support people at Dell said something about "there are rumours that someone is writing on a driver and might release it soon" |
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-- but they said this in december 2002 |
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(about 12 hours, still in progress ) |
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5. Seing this nice thread on the gentoo mailing list and feeling the urge to destroy something, instead then writing this. |
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(10 minutes) |
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Result: |
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Before you have your WLAN configuration under linux actually running assume that you wont get it running EVER - otherwise you might get |
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dissappointed |
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why am i trolling this here anyway, forget it. It has nothing todo with gentoo. |
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Eric |
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-- |
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gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
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