Getting TurnKey to work with broadcom 43XX wireless hardware

I'm sorry there's always one and this time it's me.

I'd like to get wireless working on my noisy server so that I can put it in the garage. I tried apt-get install b43-fwcutter as root which downloads and gets the driver, extracts the legacy driver then fails (see below).

root@joomla:/home/steve# apt-get install b43-fwcutter
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
b43-fwcutter is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Setting up b43-fwcutter (1:011-1) ...
-10:50:50-  http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
           => `wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o'
Resolving downloads.openwrt.org... 195.56.146.238
Connecting to downloads.openwrt.org|195.56.146.238|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 652,866 (638K) [application/x-object]

100%[====================================>] 652,866      162.82K/s    ETA 00:00

10:50:54 (162.43 KB/s) - `wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o' saved [652866/652866]

-10:50:54-  http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
           => `broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2'
Resolving downloads.openwrt.org... 195.56.146.238
Connecting to downloads.openwrt.org|195.56.146.238|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 904,072 (883K) [application/x-tar]

100%[====================================>] 904,072      164.38K/s    ETA 00:00

10:51:01 (139.34 KB/s) - `broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2' saved [904072/904072]

This file is recognised as:
  ID         :  FW10
  filename   :  wl_apsta.o
  version    :  295.14
  MD5        :  e08665c5c5b66beb9c3b2dd54aa80cb3
Extracting b43legacy/ucode2.fw
Extracting b43legacy/ucode4.fw
Extracting b43legacy/ucode5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/ucode11.fw
Extracting b43legacy/pcm4.fw
Extracting b43legacy/pcm5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/a0g0bsinitvals2.fw
Extracting b43legacy/b0g0bsinitvals5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/a0g0initvals5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/a0g1bsinitvals5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/a0g0initvals2.fw
Extracting b43legacy/a0g1initvals5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/b0g0bsinitvals2.fw
Extracting b43legacy/b0g0initvals5.fw
Extracting b43legacy/b0g0initvals2.fw
Extracting b43legacy/a0g0bsinitvals5.fw
tar: bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
dpkg: error processing b43-fwcutter (-configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 b43-fwcutter
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root@joomla:/home/steve#

I assume that there is something missing in the distribution that is required. I can't find the source code to have a look. Could you point me in the right direction please.

Thanks
Steve

Replies (7)

You are probably missing bzip2

Reply 1 2008-11-25

Yes that's done it many thanks. Steve

I will experiment

Reply 2 2008-12-29

It sounds hard. I will experiment but not tonight or tomorrow, more than a couple of days later maybe.

I am in the middle of setting up a wireless home intranet and got stuck many a time. It will definitely worth my try. After which I will plug in this server altogether.

Thanks, Liraz. :)

P.S Your information is really great. Thanks for sharing.

Appliances don't (yet) support wireless out of the box

Reply 3 2008-12-29

Note that I edited your post as you were using technical terminology incorrectly. What you meant was client/server, not guest/host.

I'd like to point out that our appliances don't yet support wireless out of the box. If you know what you're doing you can probably set it up with a bit of experimentation, like the parent poster apparently did, but don't expect it to just work. We haven't done any development or testing to support wireless yet.

If you are willing to experiment, I'll give you a few tips.

1) I don't recommend you try and setup a wireless network connection between the two computers directly.

Instead, I recommend you setup a wireless access point first.

2) You'll need the wireless-tools package:

apt-get install wireless-tools

3) You'll need to manually configure the wireless network. For example, here is the wireless configuration for a server I have running at home:

~# cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo eth1
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth1 inet static
        address 10.0.0.252
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 10.0.0.168
        wireless-essid MyWifiNetwork
        wireless-ap 00:15:E2:31:52:3A
        wireless-key BIGSECRET

Good luck!

It is a laptop..

Reply 4 2008-12-29

Hi Liraz, actually I had set up as according to what you have mentioned in your last two paragraphs. It is working. Now I am trying on a physical device. Here it is..

I am attempting a wireless connection between my desktop and laptop. My desktop is the client, while laptop is the server. After installing a turnkey appliance in my laptop I wonder how I am going to network it with my desktop. Both physical devices share the same room.

Can that be done?

Thanks very much, Liraz.

b43-fwcutter is for Broadcom 43xx chipsets only

Reply 5 2008-12-29

In case you misunderstood, the instructions above only apply to the broadcom 43xx chipset wireless hardware. It's not a generic instruction set for getting wireless to work. If your wireless hardware doesn't use that chipset these instructions don't apply to you.

Regarding your question, I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume you are using VirtualBox. If that's true you don't need to install wireless support in the TurnKey Linux "guest" virtual machine, only the host running VirtualBox.

Note that if you are using VirtualBox, I recommend you use the latest version (2.1) in which configuration of the network (especially bridging) was dramatically simplified.

Hi, a question about wireless..

Reply 6 2008-12-29

Besides having to install the driver from my server by using these command lines:

apt-get install b43-fwcutter

apt-get install bzip2

Do I need to set any "wireless" networking from my host? If my host has already settings for "Host networking", then it will be replaced with only one type of setting, am I right? Thanks.

You are probably missing bzip2

Reply 7 2008-11-25

tar: bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

It seems you tripped over an Ubuntu packaging bug. bzip2 should have been listed as a dependency for the b43-fwcutter package.

Workaround:

apt-get install bzip2