Re: b43 and late 2008 model Apple MacBook — Look ma, no wires! :-)

[Stuart Longland]

On 06/05/11 11:01, Stuart Longland wrote:
> On 06/05/11 10:37, Larry Finger wrote:
>> Coverage of the "n" devices with b43 did not become very good until
>> 2.6.39 and those changes were too invasive to be backported to earlier
>> kernels. Using the git tree from wireless-testing should work. 
>
> Ahh okay, so an update to the kernel will be worthwhile...
> I shall do a pull of the relevant git tree and see how it goes.

It seems to be actually working now...

> stuartl at vk4msl-mb ~ $ /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 ; /sbin/iwconfig wlan0
> wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:23:6c:83:b6:b7  
>           inet addr:192.168.64.45  Bcast:192.168.64.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>           inet6 addr: 2001:388:d000:1100:223:6cff:fe83:b6b7/64 Scope:Global
>           inet6 addr: fe80::223:6cff:fe83:b6b7/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:561 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:687 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
>           RX bytes:281615 (275.0 KiB)  TX bytes:99282 (96.9 KiB)
> 
> wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"longlandclan"  
>           Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:60:64:28:74:1C   
>           Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
>           Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
>           Power Management:off
>           Link Quality=70/70  Signal level=0 dBm  
>           Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
>           Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:60   Missed beacon:0

Kernel is:
> commit 3f83d64e768605b9f7a8d5d06c3ae04c94209aa1
> Merge: e1ec677 805a3b8
> Author: John W. Linville <linville at tuxdriver.com>
> Date:   Fri Jun 3 16:00:09 2011 -0400
> 
>     Merge ssh://master.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-next-2.6

> 2011-06-05 11:44:08 (3.03 MB/s) - `/home/portage/distfiles/linux-2.6.36.tar.bz2' saved [70277083/70277083]
About what I'd expect for a 54Mbps link.

Thanks for the assistance.  Hopefully this thread helps the next person
looking for wifi on similar machines.

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)      .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.