Need help w/ bcm43xx-mac80211 issues? (ndiswrapper considered harmful)

[Sean Bruno]

On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 09:17 -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> First, the issue that lots of people are having...if you are getting
> the "YOUR FIRMWARE IS TOO OLD" issue, I recommend that you follow
> this procedure:
> 
> 	# you need to be root
> 	wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
> 	tar -xjvf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
> 	bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/ broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta.o
> 
> That should fix things for most people.  However, some people still
> need/want to use the older driver even on devices that are (or should
> be) supported by the newer driver.  If you are in this situation,
> I recommend this procedure:
> 
> 	# save the file attached to this email as "bcm43xx-old-config"
> 	# you need to be root
> 	./bcm43xx-old-config
> 
> The internals of that file look a little hairy, so I don't want people
> having to type the commands themselves... :-)  Anyway, the second
> procedure is ONLY for those who have completed the first procedure and
> find the bcm43xx-mac80211 driver to be unacceptable.  This includes
> _some_ bcm4318 users and apparently a _few_ bcm4306 users.  This should
> keep most of you from having to use an unsupportable alternative
> like ndiswrapper.
> 
> Hth!
> 
> John

Thanks for the help with this posting.  And to the others who followed
up with the pointers to SELINUX.

I was able to get my new shiny Lenovo Lappy working and I was _almost_
happy until I noted the tranfer speeds.  I'm only getting 20 Kbytes/sec
2 feet from my AP on my wireless network while my Atheros based machines
get 3 Mbytes/sec 50ft from my AP.

Any ideas?

Sean