[olpc-nz] [Testing] Tested Sugar on a Stick on HP Mini 311

[Sebastian Dziallas]

[CC'ing the SoaS list, too]

Hi Tabitha!

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha at tabitha.net.nz> wrote:
> We tried out Sugar on a Stick on an HP Mini 311 today. Sadly the the
> Broadcom BCM4312 wireless doesn't work. This chipset seems to be supported
> but requires a binary firmware which is not normally distributed. I got it
> going in ubuntu lucid with some hair pulling (the restricted driver thing
> didn't work, had to do stuff manually), but I was unable to get it working
> in SoaS. I installed the correct firmware in /lib/firmware and when I
> modprobe b43, the module loads, but it doesn't create an wlan0 interface. I
> don't get any obvious errors either.
>
> I'll try again with regular fedora later.
>
> I'm not sure what can be done here. The firmware is available from the
> openwrt project, but it's not clear under what license it can be
> redistributed. Given that ubuntu and debian distribute an installer package
> (which downloads from openwrt) and the fedora instructions at
> http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 suggest manually downloading
> the firmware from openwrt, I'm guessing SugarLabs won't be distributing the
> firmware any time soon :-(

I think you're right. The official broadcom driver seems to be
non-free and is (at least for Fedora) not available in official
repositories. It has, however, found its way into RPM Fusion, which
provides such packages:http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/updates/13/i386/repoview/kmod-wl.html

In addition to the b43-fwcutter package mentioned at the link above
for Fedora, there's also a new one called b43-openfwwf available,
which is described as an "Open firmware for some Broadcom 43xx series
WLAN chips". I think we're already including this in SoaS, though, so
that your specific wifi chipset is probably not yet supported.

> Sugar displayed and functioned as expected in other respects.

I'm glad to hear that! Thanks for giving it a try! :)

--Sebastian

> Tabitha
>
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