domingo, 15 de mayo de 2011

The mystery of the missing wi-fi in Mageia/Mandriva

I've been avoiding kernel 2-6.38.4 and 2-6.38.6-1 in Mandriva because last time I found them in an update and installed them, my netbook lost its wi-fi capabilities. Yes, it would not pick any signal or start wireless connections at all. It would tell me that I needed some b43 files from a web site and the installation was beyond my understanding.

Well, I decided that I wanted to install Mageia 1 in my netbook. I will spare you the story of my mistake of installing beta1 and my consequential sadness because iBus would not work. However, when I corrected my mistake and installed beta2, my happiness upon seeing iBus working flawessly quickly faded away because I discovered that the dreadful kernel 2-6.38.4 was what Mageia uses and, therefore, my wi-fi was gone!

In a sudden revelation, I read the error message and saw that it was indicating the path were the missing files were supposed to be and were not: /lib/firmware/b43

I mounted the Pardus partition and looked for that directory. Pardus had both the b43 and the b34legacy directories, so I copied them to my Mageia home folder.

There was one problem left: How to copy the directory in Mageia's root appropriate folder? The answer is easy, with konsole, of course!

After typying su and inputting my password, I used the following command:
cp -r /home/myname/b43 /lib/firmware/

and PRESTO! in less than one second, the 39 files were copied. Then I did the same and copied the b43legacy folder.

After that, I ran Mageia Control Center, Network config, add a new connection. I selected Wireless and wlan_o. When the system asked me for the file, I located the directory /lib/firmware/b43 and selected the ucode5.fw file.

It worked. Now, I'm posting this entry using the wi-fi in Mageia beta2.

I just don't understand why is it that some people are afraid of the command line. It's so powerful and useful.

Once again, BIG THANKS PARDUS!!!

2 comentarios:

  1. Congratulations on your success!

    The answer to your question is simple: anything beyond pointing and clicking is diabolic. Period.

    I recall a story of long ago, way before I migrated to Linux...one person complained about DOSBox saying that it was for techies! Why? Because he couldn't type in the 3 commands necessary to get that emulator running.

    Also, more recently, a colleague was scared when she saw me using the DOS prompt on XP. "What is that black screen??," she asked me. :P

    Seriously...some people think a computer is a box full of magic powder and this box is only for playing games or using Facebook.

    ResponderEliminar
  2. Thank you! It took me some time to figure it out, though. And credit must also go to Pardus because it made the trick possible.

    ResponderEliminar

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