Sat Oct 20 21:11:21 PDT 2007

I ordered the 4.2 CD set of OpenBSD at work, in another optimistic step toward reorganizing the firewall there. In order to (ahem) road-test it, I installed it on my new laptop (which, you'll recall, is running Debian Stable) in a 5GB partition I'd left for just this purpose.

Onboard wireless, like with Debian, did not work, and I didn't expect it to; fuck you too, Broadcom. But my dad offered to send out a couple of wireless cards he couldn't use, and I figured one of 'em would have to work.

One was a Broadcom (op cit.), so that was out. The other, a DWL-650 (which appears to have umpty different versions over the years with not one change in model number) looked promising: a Realtek chipset, so should be good, right?

Well, it worked on OpenBSD — but not in Linux. There's no driver in the tree for it, and the outside project to make drivers for it had its last official release in 2005. What's more, the CVS version, for some reason, removes all of its source files when I compile it, then complains that there are no files left to compile. To be fair, I think this is because of a makefile included from /lib/modules/2.6.22-2-686/build rather than the code itself.

Update: Just read Tourrilhes' page on the RealTek driver, and learned something: there's a fork/resurrection of the project I'd looked at, and it appears to be relatively current. I'll have to take a look. SooperUpdate: the new project fixes the let's-delete-all-the-files problem. Score!

What OpenBSD does not do on this laptop is suspend…or more accurately, come back from suspension. This works reasonably well under Debian, which means that I still have one rose to give away to The Next Laptop OS for Saint Aardvark.

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Comment from Prakash Purushotham
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:22:02 -0400 (EDT)

Hi Hugh

You can use the fwcutter tool (web page, download) to extract the microcode from Linksys Windows drivers.

They work fine on Slackware. I would believe they will work on Etch too.

Best regards

Prakash

Comment from Saint Aardvark the Carpeted
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:07:18 -0700

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I've tried that and get:

        Sorry, the input file is either wrong or not supported by
        b43-fwcutter.

when I point it at the drivers from Linksys (version 2.1).

Comment from Prakash Purushotham
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:37:38 -0400 (EDT)

I have used the bcm43xx-fwcutter utility (from the bcm43xx.berlios.de website) and I have not had problems with the .fw files. Although the LinuxWireless website says that bcm43xx-fwcutter is for Mac, it is this utility that I used all on my Compaq.

This link (to the file R112196.exe) has the Dell 1370 wireless drivers. run bcm43xx-fwcutter bcmwl5.sys to extract the .fw files