several discrepancies with new -2139 kernel.

[Patrick]

On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 13:41 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Gene Heskett wrote:
> 
> > Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> >> In fact, for most mobile applications, NetworkManager is the better tool 
> >> anyway.
> >> 
> > I've never been able to make it work with the broadcom radio in this lappy. 
> > To me NM is terminally broken. YMMV of course.
> 
> I have an ipw2200 and an Orinoco and my M does indeed V.  But from the 
> NM FAQ:
> 
>      I'm using a Broadcom 4xxx-based card, but NetworkManager won't connect
>      to my wireless network. Why?
> 
>      The Broadcom wireless drivers are under active development and have
>      come a long way, but are not quite as mature as others. It's a good
>      bet that bcm4xxx problems will be solved in furture kernel versions.
>      Until recently, this driver did not support the Shared Key WEP
>      authentication mode, still used by many access points. There are also
>      reported problems connecting to open networks.
> 
>      A workaround might be to use the NDISWrapper driver instead of the the
>      bcm43xx driver included in the Linux kernel, at least until the kernel
>      driver version fixes these bugs.
> 
> So YMMV in the future as well, and I'd recommend you keep trying.  It's a 
> nice tool when it works.  Reports I've seen of success with ndiswrapper 
> have been mixed.

I have a Broadcom BCM4318 chip in my Acer laptop. With the latest
NetworkManager installed and active I can not get a WiFi connection to
work with a SpeedTouch 716 using WPA-PSK with AES (also not with
ndiswrapper). I can make it work when I stop NetworkManager &
NetworkManagerDispatcher and then do:

# /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth1 \
-c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd

$ sudo wpa_gui
(check if you were authenticated ok)

# ifup eth1
(for this to work you have already configured a wireless device that use
dhcp)

Voila, one working WiFi link. I'm still amazed it works :)

Contents of /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant:

INTERFACES="-ieth1"
DRIVERS="-Dwext"

Contents of /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
eapol_version=1
fast_reauth=1
ap_scan=1

network={
        ssid="<name of my wifi box>"
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        proto=WPA
        pairwise=CCMP
        group=CCMP
        psk="<my passphrase in plain text without 0x prepended>"
}

This setup works both with the bcm43xx module and ndiswrapper.
Hope this help.

Regards,
Patrick