broadcom-wl seems to cause crashes

[namelis]

i am using fedora 16

have bcm 4321 wireless card i instald broadcom-wl as described in this guide

and ever since i crash aproximitly every 10 minuits although it doesnot crash the same way each time

i blacklisted wl so that i could try ndiswrapper only drivers could find to download tell me that is not .inf even though it is when i run ndiswrapper

so what shuld i do the crashes stop with wl blacklisted but then i have no internet and if i modprobe wl then i get internet back for like 10 minuits then system crashes

[stoat]

Hello namelis,

First, I have no idea why the system crashes. Sorry.

Next, I used ndiswrapper for a long time before any Broadcom drivers for Linux existed. It worked fine for me. But you should be using a Windows driver that makes your device work in XP or W2K or even W98. Drivers for Vista and later are known not to do well with ndiswrapper. Also be sure to use 64-bit Windows drivers for a 64-bit Fedora system. Lastly, be prepared to recompile ndiswrapper for each new kernel (if you're compiling it). If you're using the RPM Fusion kmod version, update that for every new kernel. Otherwise, everything else that I know about ndiswrapper is in that HOWTO that you mentioned.

But what about this... Maybe NetworkManager is the problem. It's not hard to disable NM and establish a connection the old fashioned way with network, ifconfig, wpa_supplicant, and dhclient (I did it that way before I ever heard of NM). Just as a test, you know?

What about the encryption? Try connecting without encryption just for a while to see what happens. Or, try another WPA mode or something.

What about your router? Try connecting directly to the modem for a while.

Things like that might be interesting to rule out at least.

[namelis]

ok stoat thanks for the advice i still had the problem without NetworkManager and i had already tryed a wired connection which ran fine although i went with direct to router rather then direct to modem

as for ndiswrapper the driver i was trying to use was not the 64bit version i found the 46bit version and it let me install it but it still did notwork so i thought maby i was using ones for wrong version of windows im not shure there was sevral all in one folder but there was only the one. inf file i tryed to find drivers in several places and i found 2 that said they were for win xp one only claimed to be for xp and was called bcmwl5 the outher said it was for xp,vista,and win7 it had lots more files in it that are all some vairation of bcmwl6 most of them were .dll only 1 .inf and 2 .sys (one for 64bit one for 32bit) which as far as i can tell was the only 2 that ndiswraper cares about the .inf and .sys

but anyway neather bcmwl5 or bcmwl6 worked so i gave up and got a wireless bridge so i can use a wired connection threw it so now im using that and i can ignore the whole wireless issue and im good so long as wl is not running do you think i should remove broadcom-wl and the rest of its dependencys or is it fine to just leave it blacklisted

[stoat]

Originally Posted by namelis

...do you think i should remove broadcom-wl and the rest of its dependencys or is it fine to just leave it blacklisted

Functionally, it should make no difference either way. But those packages will continue to be updated from the RPM Fusion repo as long as they are there (not that it matters very much though).

Personally, I'm sure I would remove all of it. But that's just me. If you decide to do that, you can list the broadcom-wl and kmod-wl packages with yum or rpm. Then remove them with yum or rpm. You also could cleanup the blacklist file. All of that should be harmless.