Submitted by j.a.watson on February 5, 2009 - 7:52am
This is just a quick note while I have this information fresh in my head... I've spent most of this morning figuring out some quirks about the Broadcom 4312 drivers on Mepis 8.
Most importantly, the b43 drivers are definitely included in the Mepis 8.0 RC2 distribution. But the wl drivers are used by default. Switching drivers is not as straightforward as it looks like it would be, nor even as straightforward as I indicated yesterday. Here is what this morning's experience leads me to believe you have to do:
- In the MEPIS Network Assistant, on the General page, change the selection from Enable Ndiswrapper and Broadcom wl driver to Enable Broadcom b43 and b44 drivers.
- Reboot. Unfortunately, you will find that Mepis is still using the wl driver...
- Edit / etc / modprobe.d / blacklist and at the end of the file add blacklist wl.
- Reboot. Now you will see that the b43 drivers are being used. The most obvious difference is that Knemo shows a wireless icon instead of the typical wired icon. Odd that is was showing the wired icon when the wl drivers were being used, I suppose that is a side effect of the style of driver. Unfortunately, even though Knemo tells you that the wireless interface is connected, it still won't work.
- In the MEPIS Network Assistant, on the Interfaces page, interface wlan0, select Start at boot. This was selected by default for the wl driver, I don't know why it isn't for b43.
- Reboot. The world is a wonderful place.
I'm sure this can be optimised, some steps can be combined, but after getting confused about what was and wasn't working and why, I finally went back through the whole thing, from a clean MEPIS install, to be certain. I'm not about to go through it again, as long as this is working.
Next step... careful details about installing the latest openchrome driver package.
jw
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Update and WARNING
by j.a.watson - Feb 5 2009 - 8:15am
The b43 driver on MEPIS seems to be unstable to me. Even when everything else is done correctly, it appears to lose the connection every few minutes. Knemo doesn't report any loss, but nothing will connect. Switching the wireless off and on forces a reconnect, and then it's ok for a few minutes again. This does NOT happen with the wl driver, so you would probably be well advised to stay with that.
jw