bcm43xx wireless support

Forum thread started by Snuhwolf on Mon, 2010-07-19 22:48

I have a broadcom4306 wireless minipci card that is working with puppy linux flawlessly. Is there support for this in Haiku? I checked the wireless "how to" and it suggests that it is. Does it need the firmware "fw-cutter" to work properly? In linux there is a file "firmware" with all the bcm43xx files in it. Any possibility this wifi card to work?

Comments

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by humdinger - 2010-07-20 06:29

Hi Snuhwolf!
Did you look at the topic "The firmware installer" about half-way down the wifi page? the script install-wifi-firmwares.sh shoud do the trick. If you can't go online (by wire) under Haiku yet, there's also a link to an offline-alternative.

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by Snuhwolf - 2010-07-20 19:10

Ok I made the zip file and extracted it to /boot So now there is a file "wifi-firmware". Will Haiku see this driver now as it is or is there another step to install it?
Thanks

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by humdinger - 2010-07-21 15:47

I have never done that myself, but in the "download-data-for-wlan-firmwares" script it says at the end:

Extract $archiveName to your Haiku's /boot
Then run install-wifi-firmwares.sh

So it looks like you just have to run install-wifi-firmwares.sh to finally install the downloaded/unzipped firmwares.

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by Snuhwolf - 2010-07-21 16:01

Its a "catch-22" situation. If you download it to /boot the shell script is set to look for an active internet connection to *download* the file you already have. Unless of course I'm reading the 'install-wifi-firmwares.sh' wrong. Heres where I think it fails:

function DownloadFileIfNotCached()
{
# DownloadFileIfNotCached
local url=$1
local file=$2
local dir=$3

mkdir -p "$dir"
if [ ! -e $dir/$file ] ; then
echo "Downloading $url ..."
wget -nv -O $dir/$file $url
fi
result=$?
if [ $result -gt 0 ]; then
local error="Failed to download $url."
local msg="As a result, ${driver}'s firmware will not be installed."
alert --warning "$error $msg"
fi

So it seems it looks for an active internet connection and when it cant use 'wget' it returns the error message "unable to download bcm43xx install aborted".
I can click on the script in BeOS which *is* connected to the internet and run the script, unfortunately as I see it, it will install to this BeOS partition and not my Haiku one.
I'm not good with scripts so re-writing it for an "off-line install" is beyond me.
Thanks

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by humdinger - 2010-07-21 17:59

I'm not a big scripter myself, but I think the lines

if [ ! -e $dir/$file ] ; then
...

only tries to download the file if the folder/file isn't there yet. But since you got all the data with that other script, ran under another OS and unpacking the thereby created zip to /boot, the file/folder already exists and nothing gets downloaded.

So: execute the download-data-for-wlan-firmwares script on another OS, unpack the cretated zip in Haiku to /boot/ and execute install-wifi-firmwares.sh once more to install the firmwares.

I think others have done it, so it should work...

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by Snuhwolf - 2010-07-21 20:51

It absolutely does not work. The script fails in exactly the same place regardless of where you unzip and save the files to. It returns a message complaining that wget couldnt download the files from the repos. So that script, as is, is only going to work to install the drivers on a system that *already has* internet connectivity.
Oh well, it was a nice experiment. Probably time to give that laptop away :)

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by mmadia - 2010-07-21 22:45

Which version of Haiku are you trying this in?

What OS did you try using the offline-alternative from? -- that script needs a linux/unix-like shell that has `wget` & `zip` installed.

Here's the contents of haiku-wifi-firmware-data.zip

        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/
        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/data/
        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/data/firmware/
        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/
        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/b43-fwcutter/
    14138  06-02-09 15:54   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/b43-fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-012.tar.bz2
     1489  10-19-09 22:42   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/b43-fwcutter/byteswap.h
        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/b43-fwcutter/bits/
     4592  10-19-09 22:42   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/b43-fwcutter/bits/byteswap.h
   652866  01-05-06 00:17   system/data/firmware/broadcom43xx/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
        0  07-21-10 18:33   system/data/firmware/marvell88w8335/
   139536  10-13-07 18:26   system/data/firmware/marvell88w8335/malo-firmware-1.4.tgz

You can even look in /boot/system/data/firmware/ to see if those files have been extracted.
If you unzip "haiku-wifi-firmware-data.zip" to '/boot', then `install-wifi-firmwares.sh` will not attempt to download any files.

Re: bcm43xx wireless support

by Snuhwolf - 2010-07-22 19:31

I used BeOS MAX to download and create the zip file. I then unzipped it to the /boot directory on the Haiku disk. Then I ran the install-wifi script. And it complained ( again) that there was no connection to the internet to download the files I'd downloaded and unzipped :)
But the problem resolved itself: I've given the laptop away. So now I can get a different laptop. Maybe.