THE SOLUTION TO THE bcm43xx PROBLEM… And in a one-click non-terminal way!

OMG

I kid you not –I spent much of the day re-re-reinstalling Linux! If only I had found this earlier.

It’s the EASY WAY!

Props to Mr. or Ms. ‘DarkNOOB‘

the “easy ways” I was finding before weren’t at all easy.

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By the time I finally threw in the towel last night and decided to have a cocktail, I had in the neighborhood of 30 tabs open in firefox. All forum discussion threads discussing this whole issue with the bcm43xx chipset used by some wireless cards.

Ironically, most of the solutions being offered by the smarties in the forums involve:

A. Using the Synaptic Package Manager to download everything you need: ndiswrapper, ndiswrapper-utils, make (in order to use ndiswrapper), and a whole bunch of other dependancies…

B. going the fwcutter direction. Yada Yada.

The ironic thing about these idea is that it’s not an option to simply download these things from the repositories, if you don’t have an effin connection!

I tried both and find it really frustrating that there isn’t a fully functioning reliable version of Synaptic online!

I ended up downloading deb after deb finding that each level had numerous dependencies that I didn’t have.

Here’s a pic of the contents of my jump drive.

Part of my problem is that I don’t know jack about Linux. I’m not affraid of the command line, just new at it.

I will try to update this with how I finally end up solving this silly problem.

And I must say, the fact that this whole problem is a copyright issue over the firmware for these cards is amazing. Who cares about rights to their stupid firmware?

The reason I’m going with Xubuntu 6.06 and not 7 is because the BIOS of this PC is 1999 and I couldn’t get ANYWHERE trying to upgrade that, not even to thirty open browser tabs of non-helpful forum threads and a flash drive full of useless junk!

Heading over to a friends house to see if I can use his Synaptic to get the packages I need along with all the dependancies.

I will update if I get this piece of shit working

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Basically, the default display setting need to be changed through the linux terminal or you boot up to a blank black sceen. First I found this from the forum:

1. ctrl-option-F1 (should give you a command prompt)
2. type: sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf (return)
3. make your edits (see below)
4. ctrl-O (return) to write edited file
5. ctrl-X to exit nano back to command line
6. type: sudo /etc/init.d/kdm restart (return) to restart KDE

At the very least you’ll need to modify “HorizSync” to 60-60 and “VertRefresh” to 75-117. Both are in the monitors section.

If you restart KDE and everything is in extreme slo-mo, you’ll also need to edit xorg.conf to disable DRI (in the modules section, put a hash mark (#) at the beginning of the line containing “load dri”).

…but I didn’t have KDE, knowing a little more now I was able to find this

sudo killall gdm

then

sudo gdm start

Then, I didn’t have the login for Xubuntu, so I was able to find this:

control option F1

sudo adduser yourusername

answer the questions and your password when happy y to accept.

sudo killall gdm

then

sudo gdm start

Someone named Brandon Stafford has additional information that it looks like I may need as I go forward.

1. Put the Breezy Badger for PowerPC install disk in the CD drive.

2. Reboot.

3. At the first prompt, type “server” and hit return. This will install everything in normal Ubuntu install except the GNOME desktop.

4. Install the Xubuntu desktop and the GNU display manager using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop gdm

5. To get the graphical interface working, I had to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf a little. The first change was to alter the HorizSync and VertRefresh settings. I also switched from the fbdev driver to the ati driver. The snippet below shows the original settings commented out and the new settings added. (Link to full xorg.conf.)

Section “Device”
Identifier “Generic Video Card”
# Driver “fbdev”
Driver “ati”
Option “UseFBDev” “true”
EndSectionSection “Monitor”
Identifier “Generic Monitor”
Option “DPMS”
# HorizSync 28-51
# VertRefresh 43-60
HorizSync 60-60
VertRefresh 43-117
EndSection
6. The last tweak was to add a printer to CUPS manually. To enable the web administration for CUPS, I added a root password:

sudo -s

passwd

In /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, I changed RunAsUser to No, so that CUPS would run as root, and not switch to run as the user cupsys, as I believe this is what disables the web interface:

RunAsUser No

Then restart CUPS:

/etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Here is what ended up in /etc/cups/printers.conf: (Yes, I live in a farmhouse, and I work on Sunday nights)

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.23
# Written by cupsd on Sun 08 Jan 2006 07:34:40 PM EST

Info Farmhouse
DeviceURI socket://192.168.1.131
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0

Overall, Xubuntu is working really well– much better than OS 9.2. It’s only got 64 MB of RAM, but Firefox runs surprisingly well. I plan on maxing out the memory when I get the chance.

The Xubuntu people have been planning on releasing a CD version of Xubuntu coincident with the release of the Dapper Drake in April. I found the XFCE file manager, xffm, to be a little squirrely, and I couldn’t get it to connect to our file server through Samba; maybe that will work in the next release, or maybe I will have figured out how to configure Samba. The Dapper release of Xubuntu will likely be based on XFCE 4.4, which will allegedly include the first release of Thunar, XFCE’s new file manager.

Hmm. If Thunar is good, I might switch to Xubuntu entirely. So far, XFCE seems like a fast version of GNOME to me, and I spend most of my time in Firefox and a terminal window anyway.

and this too:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the /etc/X11/xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type “man /etc/X11/xorg.conf” at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section “Files”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/cyrillic”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1″
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/CID”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi”
FontPath “/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi”
# paths to defoma fonts
FontPath “/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType”
FontPath “/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID”
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load “GLcore”
Load “i2c”
Load “bitmap”
Load “ddc”
Load “dri”
Load “extmod”
Load “freetype”
Load “glx”
Load “int10″
Load “type1″
Load “vbe”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Keyboard”
Driver “kbd”
Option “CoreKeyboard”
Option “XkbRules” “xorg”
Option “XkbModel” “pc104″
Option “XkbLayout” “us”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ImPS/2″
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “true”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Generic Video Card”
# Driver “fbdev”
Driver “ati”
Option “UseFBDev” “true”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Generic Monitor”
Option “DPMS”
# HorizSync 28-51
# VertRefresh 43-60
HorizSync 60-60
VertRefresh 43-117
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Device “Generic Video Card”
Monitor “Generic Monitor”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 1
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 4
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 8
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 15
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 16
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”
InputDevice “Generic Keyboard”
InputDevice “Configured Mouse”
EndSection

Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection

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