Acer Extensa 5420 Rollback to XP Pro, Broadcom wireless card issue

[Chardius]

I've had an Acer Extensa 5420 for about 1.4 years now, I eventually got tired of Vista on it and jumped whole hog into Ubuntu figuring I could just use WINE to run my old windows apps. Welllllll then I find that ATI has issues using linux and I've forgone that route and instead I've loaded a copy of Win XP Pro SP2 (pretty sure its 2 here) and everything works great except for the integrated wireless card.

The card is a BCM 4310 and for whatever reason I can't get the driver to install properly, what i've done is:

Downloaded driver from acer here:
http://us.acer.com/acer/service.do?...tx1g.c2att92=453&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=2054404012

Ran the install/setup that comes in the file.

Reset the machine and booted with windows.

Result: NOTHING.

Attempt type 2:
UNinstalled and disabled device and driver.

Ran Detect New Hardware.

Installed the same driver from link above.

Reset machine.

Result: NOTHING.

I'm at a loss for whatever else I can do, I've done internet searches on the problem, checked out other tech support forums, and the whole nine yards.

POSSIBLE Problem I just found:

To get the device to work on my Ubuntu boot I had to manually install the devices own firmware onto the thing itself. Would the device use different firmware for different operating systems?

Is there someway that I can keep both firmwares at hand for reinstall when I wish to switch operating systems?

Is this even a problem?

I can provide more info if necessary.

 

[T-Rexx]

I hate Broadcom.

See if the Broadcom program "Driver Whiz" can identify and download the correct XP driver for you. Get it here.

Second, you did a firmware upgrade of the Broadcom card in order to get it to work in Ubuntu? If so, that is almost certainly why the driver for XP is not working. I have never heard of that being necessary for any hardware device for Linux, so that seems weird. But no, if this is truly necessary to get the card to work in Ubuntu, then you will have to choose which OS you want to use. You will not be able to dual boot and use the wireless network card in both OSs (did I mention I hate Broadcom?).

Third, what "issues" are you having with the ATI driver for Ubuntu? ATI has been reasonably supportive of Linux, and good drivers are generally readily available for ATI hardware for Ubuntu. According to this guide to installing Linux on the Acer Extensa, the ATI Mobility Radeon X1250 card in the Extensa 5420 is supported.

(BTW, the guide to installing Linux on the Acer Extensa says of the Broadcom wireless that "You need a recent Linux distribution such as Fedora 10 for this to work." I presume they mean without updating the firmware on the card, but I do not know this definitively. I also presume, however, that the version of Ubuntu you installed was already the most recent (9.10 - "Karmic Koala"), which should be okay.

Also, Ubuntu 10.4 should be out by noon tomorrow, 29 April 2010.

System>Administration>Update Manager will inform you if the upgrade is available. Just follow the prompts to upgrade your Ubuntu version to 10.4.)




http://driverwhiz.com/drivers-en?br...-90000000110&gclid=CO3Zh7XLqaECFYeF7QodCz_-HQ


http://www.linlap.com/wiki/acer+extensa+5420

 

[seven2go]

Are you installing the drivers ONLY or some convoluted application?
Try uninstalling whatever you have, copy ONLY the drivers, and use those.
I KNOW that works great in a Windows environment.......it's worth a shot I think.

 

[Chardius]

I hate Broadcom.

See if the Broadcom program "Driver Whiz" can identify and download the correct XP driver for you. Get it here.

Second, you did a firmware upgrade of the Broadcom card in order to get it to work in Ubuntu? If so, that is almost certainly why the driver for XP is not working. I have never heard of that being necessary for any hardware device for Linux, so that seems weird. But no, if this is truly necessary to get the card to work in Ubuntu, then you will have to choose which OS you want to use. You will not be able to dual boot and use the wireless network card in both OSs (did I mention I hate Broadcom?).

Third, what "issues" are you having with the ATI driver for Ubuntu? ATI has been reasonably supportive of Linux, and good drivers are generally readily available for ATI hardware for Ubuntu. According to this guide to installing Linux on the Acer Extensa, the ATI Mobility Radeon X1250 card in the Extensa 5420 is supported.

(BTW, the guide to installing Linux on the Acer Extensa says of the Broadcom wireless that "You need a recent Linux distribution such as Fedora 10 for this to work." I presume they mean without updating the firmware on the card, but I do not know this definitively. I also presume, however, that the version of Ubuntu you installed was already the most recent (9.10 - "Karmic Koala"), which should be okay.

Also, Ubuntu 10.4 should be out by noon tomorrow, 29 April 2010.

System>Administration>Update Manager will inform you if the upgrade is available. Just follow the prompts to upgrade your Ubuntu version to 10.4.)




http://driverwhiz.com/drivers-en?br...-90000000110&gclid=CO3Zh7XLqaECFYeF7QodCz_-HQ


http://www.linlap.com/wiki/acer+extensa+5420

1. I'm entirely certain that I have the correct driver. I have gotten a file with the same driver update code doohicky (working on 29 hours of being awake here, hate 3rd shift....) from both acer and the broadcom servers.

2. I'm also certain that yes, I had to extract the firmware from the driver sourcecode using B43-FWCutter and then install it manually onto the device itself for it to work.
See:

The Broadcom wireless chip needs software, called "firmware", that runs on the wireless chip itself during operation. This firmware is copyrighted by Broadcom and must be extracted from Broadcom's proprietary drivers. To get such firmware on your system, you must download the driver from a legal distribution point, as noted below. Then you must extract the firmware from that Broadcom driver by using b43-fwcutter (or bcm43xx-fwcutter) and install it in the special directory for firmware - usually /lib/firmware. Please note that the firmware from the binary drivers is copyrighted by Broadcom Corporation and must not be redistributed.

From:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#firmware

I swear its the only way I could get the damn thing to work. Broadcom is full of FAIL, might this card be accessible and thus extractable to be replaced with something a little more dual boot friendly? I'm getting tired of laptops and their limited upgradeableness, bout to just build another desktop and keep this thing around to dick with ubuntu.

3. I have an unjustified hatred of ATI, everytime I try to do something fancy the ATI card in the machine at the time gives me the finger and halts my progress. Its been a while since I made real progress on the problem but the long and short of it is that while it seems to work all rendering is being done via software and not the card. At least thats what I think it was doing when I was trying to get it working properly. That was some months ago, the issue may be solved by appropriate updates and more research on my part, I just haven't cared enough to dick with ATI cards. Which would require a lot of caring on my part.

This laptop is overall a pretty crappy little machine at the moment, stress fractures on the lid have removed its mobile capacity (my fault that I didn't know how to/that I could fix it at the time). Both boots on the system work at about 85% capacity for what I want them to do.

Are you installing the drivers ONLY or some convoluted application?
Try uninstalling whatever you have, copy ONLY the drivers, and use those.
I KNOW that works great in a Windows environment.......it's worth a shot I think.

Yeah did that, I think i'm just stuck at putting money into this machine. How good does a USB wifi adapter work? Considering that apparently this card is connected with a usb port internally I can't imagine that it could be any worse than what i've got now.

 

[Chardius]

HA! Even after a few years I still forget that this thing has an expansion port, might go that route. *shrug*

 

[T-Rexx]

^ That's a good idea. It probably has a Cardbus (=PCMCIA) slot. Here is a list of Cardbus wifi networking cards, and whether or not they are known to work with Linux: http://tuxmobil.org/pcmcia_linux.html .

So far, virtually every usb wifi dongle I have tried works just fine with Ubuntu.

 

[T-Rexx]

I have an unjustified hatred of ATI, everytime I try to do something fancy the ATI card in the machine at the time gives me the finger and halts my progress. Its been a while since I made real progress on the problem but the long and short of it is that while it seems to work all rendering is being done via software and not the card. At least thats what I think it was doing when I was trying to get it working properly. That was some months ago, the issue may be solved by appropriate updates and more research on my part, I just haven't cared enough to dick with ATI cards. Which would require a lot of caring on my part.

It has been my experience that the community-supplied (FOSS) video drivers generally work better than the proprietary (vendor-supplied) drivers. That seems counter-intuitive, but that has been my experience. You only need the proprietary drivers if you want to do fancy stuff like the spinning cube in Compiz, etc. I have no use for such things, however, so I always just go with the default driver that the OS installs for me at the initial Linux installation.

This laptop is overall a pretty crappy little machine at the moment, stress fractures on the lid have removed its mobile capacity (my fault that I didn't know how to/that I could fix it at the time).

Sounds like an ideal candidate computer for Linux!

 

[Chardius]

Well all right, looks like i'll go shopping for a cheap external wireless adapter. I don't need it to work with linux, the broadcom actually works fine on linux. I just need something to work on the windows boot so I can play wow again, haha.

 

[Chardius]

UPDATE!!!!

Success! I replaced my old broadcom wifi card with a DIFFERENT broadcom wifi card and stuffed it with some dell drivers! YAY IT WORKS! Both Ubuntu and WinXP-Pro can use it without issue. Few....NOw I have a functional machine that will tide me over till I get mah desktop.