[SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

[tomcloyd]

Virtually every new release of KB leads to wireless problems with my HP Mini 110 and its Broadcom 4312 802.11b/g/n WLAN/Bluetooth module. I've always been able to get it working (with help!), until now.

Here's what I've done to try to get wireless access restored.

1. Installed WICD.

2. Used the "Additional Drivers" program on the K-menu to locate and activate the one driver it could find - the "Broadcom STA wireless driver". Result: no access, because authentication failed. "Bad password" was the reported problem. But the password was correct.

3. Googling around brought me to the excellent Ubuntu wiki page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...Driver/bcm43xx. Following instructions on this page I installed packages b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer.

This resulted in an error:

Unpacking firmware-b43-installer (from .../firmware-b43-installer_4.150.10.5-5_all.deb) ...
Setting up firmware-b43-installer (4.150.10.5-5) ...
Not supported low-power chip with PCI id 14e4:4315!
Aborting.
dpkg: error processing firmware-b43-installer (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 firmware-b43-installer
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The "Not supported low-power chip with PCI id 14e4:4315!" part seems to be the problem. I've never seen this problem before. I have no idea why it suddenly cropped up, after this chipset has work OK (with some persuasion) through several previous KB versions.

Can anyone suggest to me what my options are at this point? I really need to get wireless working, and the sooner the better.

[wizard10000]

Re: HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

I have an HP Mini 110 that until recently had a Broadcom 4312 WLAN card in it.

The Broadcom STA driver *is* the driver you should use for the low-power 4312 card. I think the problem is that your wicd install left network manager components installed, and that seems to always break networking.

Two things to do.

First, uninstall the b43 driver and firmware and reinstall the Broadcom STA driver.

Second, insure all network manager components are uninstalled as this will cause the error you're experiencing. You'd think that a wicd install would remove all network manager stuff but it doesn't.

Do this in a terminal window -

sudo dpkg -l | grep network

All network manager components should have an 'rc' in the leftmost column - any that are marked 'ii' are still installed and need to be removed for wicd to funtion properly.

Hope this helps -

edit: see this bug -

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/799114

[tomcloyd]

Re: HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

Actually, I was aware of the wicd/network-manager incompatibility, having worked through the problem with previous versions of KB. This time it just wouldn't work, regardless of what I had. I did find a couple of misc. pieces of network-manager using your dpkg command, but removing them made no difference.

So...no wireless since 11.04 upgrade.

Then, today, after that collection of upgrades/installs, for some reason, it just works. I'd been hoping this would happen, as I've been through this a few times before. Nice to have wireless back.

Thanks for your response and help.

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

Tom, You might try a different distro. I have an HP Mini 110 using Bodhi Linux and it's great. 3-D effects, wifi out of the box, and a small memory and hard drive footprint.

Bodhi Linux

[wizard10000]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

I got lucky with my Mini 110-1100DX and found a hacked BIOS that had the wireless whitelist removed and replaced my Broadcom 4312 with an Intel 6200 a/b/g/n card.

I don't understand why HP whitelists internal wireless cards in BIOS - once I did some research on it I found they don't only do it with netbooks. Strange - I don't know why they'd care what wireless card you ran.

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

That is odd. If our government cared about the people, it would require a disclosure from HP stating "HP will not allow you to upgrade this computer" or some such.

Likely no one would read it anyway...

[ardvark71]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

Likely no one would read it anyway...

I would!

Regards...

[tomcloyd]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

Tom, You might try a different distro. I have an HP Mini 110 using Bodhi Linux and it's great. 3-D effects, wifi out of the box, and a small memory and hard drive footprint.

Bodhi Linux

It DOES look appealing. But, I'm so over-my-head with learning new software right now (on LibreOffice Base Documentation team, etc.) that I cannot imagine firing up a new OS. Plus, I must keep 3 machines updated so I can switch among them seamlessly. I keep them as identical as possible, to minimize the overhead.

Sure does look like a nice minimalist OS, though...

[tshann]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

Hi,
I went through a great deal to try to get this puppy to work in Kubuntu 11.04. The final solution - for my rig (HP DV6233se) was to uninstall the bcmwl-kernel-source. I did confirm that the bcm43xx was blacklisted and removed the blacklist - didn't work. No fix on the broadcom sta driver ever worked. But after installing firmware-b43-installer (which automatically brought in cutter) I could get it to work, but I had to log into a terminal every time @ boot up and type in sudo modprobe b43. It was only after removing the above source file and rebooting that my rig came up with a working wireless for Kubuntu 11.04. Hope this is useful for someone else.

Peace

[tomcloyd]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

FOR THE RECORD - I just now reviewed this thread, and didn't see a post by me indicating how I finally solved the problem. As it appears that different people are having success with different approaches, it might be useful to someone to post how I finally solved the problem with KB 11.04. I realize that what follows - my personal notes on the matter - is a bit redundant, given what is already in this thread, but I haven't time to resolve that minor issue, so will just post my notes and move on:

There is a problem with this box. The "chipset used" by the HP Mini 110 isn't supported by the default Ubuntu drivers. The solution to this is simple - use a non-default network manager, and manually install the correct driver:

1. Establish a wired connection.
2. Install the _WICD Network Manager_ from the packages. Make sure all traces of the network-manager and plasma-widget-networkmanagement packages are removed.
3. Reboot, and manually establish a wired connection through WICD.
4. Using the K-launch menu, launch the Additional drivers program, and let it search for relevant drivers (which it will do without prompting). For me, it found two: Broadcom B43 wireless driver and the Broadcom STA wireless driver. Select the first and "activate" it.

Now, where before WICD could see but not connect to the desired wireless network, now the connection can be made and maintained.

[GreyGeek]

Re: [SOLVED] HP Mini 110 / Broadcom b43 driver woes

.....
I could get it to work, but I had to log into a terminal every time @ boot up and type in sudo modprobe b43. It was only after removing the above source file and rebooting that my rig came up with a working wireless for Kubuntu 11.04.
....

When ever you modprobe a kernel module, it works, and you want to have it load automatically, one way to do that is to issue
sudo depmod -a
while the desired module is loaded and working. Depmod creates a list of module dependencies by reading each module under /lib/modules/version and determining what symbols it exports and what symbols it needs. And, it will also generate various map files for use by the hotplug infrastructure.