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

[Rafał Miłecki]

2011/6/5 Stuart Longland <redhatter at gentoo.org>:
>
> 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.

Status is quite nice described on our wiki page [0]. It really says
support for your chipset is experimental only in 2.6.38 :)

[0] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

-- 
Rafał