[SOLVED] Ceni, wifi, BCM 4313 woes

[surio]

I had an eerie sense of deja vu reading this thread: http://vsido.org/index.php/topic,425.0.html

It kind of mirrors my own sid experience as well. But (and it is a big one ), VSIDO worked for me. And love the way it is engineered.

I have a BCM 4313 wifi, and  it's always been touch-and-go since installation date. Installed kernel-firmware, and got wifi working.

The connections are always temperamental at best though. If I lose the connection from wifi, I end up not being able to simply plug and use the wired connection. No matter how many times I run ceni, I cannot get it to reconnect it either with eth0 or wlan0 if it loses connection (which it does all the time). The only way out is a reboot. I see a message at boot time that "binds" my gateway (router) IP to either eth0 (if cable is attached) or wlan0 (if no cable attached). And somehow this becomes "binding and final" for that session, I think.   

I have removed dhcp/auto for eth0 and explicitly specified IP/Subnet/gateway for eth0. Still no joy. Somehow ceni cannot seem to re-attch the gateway ip as and when required

I have used wicd on slackware and I am able to do this without problems for the same laptop. The laptop connects to wired on login, and if I choose wifi instead, the wired is disconnected. FWIW, I have explicitly specified IP/Subnet/gateway for eth0 and dhcp for wifi in slack, and that works fine.

I installed wicd on VSIDO but now I am not able to figure out how to replace ceni with wicd, to test things out. As of now, both of them, i.e., ceni and wicd start up, and wicd is shut down by the system (I think)....

I do not have a preference for either ceni or wicd. TBH, I am interested in learning how to use ceni correctly for configuring the system, as I already understand wicd.

I have used the ceni tutorial provided in the forums by @jedi already.

I am on a slackware session now, and I will provide you with system inputs for VSIDO in a while.

thanks,
surio.

[VastOne]

Thanks for this detailed report on what you have done surio.  I am still torn on ceni vs wicd, but it seems there have been little issues with ceni

wicd otoh seemed to always work..

[PackRat]

I installed wicd on VSIDO but now I am not able to figure out how to replace ceni with wicd, to test things out. As of now, both of them, i.e., ceni and wicd start up, and wicd is shut down by the system (I think)....

This may be because ceni writes to the /etc/network/interfaces file while wicd (and gnome's network manager) do not. I'm pretty sure if you edit (as root) the /etc/network/interfaces file and comment out everything but the:

Code Select Expand

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

lines (usually at the beginning) then wicd should work.

If you go back to using ceni, you will need to remove the wicd configuration files.

[surio]

@PackRat, @VastOne, @jedi/@JedsDesk

Thanks to you all.

Permanent solution to all those fellow Broadcom sufferers (oops!  ) users is to uninstall ceni and install wicd (along with all the wicd tools).

It works beautifully, and dareisay, out-of-the-box! Whoop-de-doo!

No dropped calls, no tearing your hairs, no rising blood pressures

Again, thanks to those that helped.

Ciao for now.
surio o/