And Another Successful VSIDO Install

[tlinsley]

Installed VSIDO in a vbox guest at work and liked it so much that I decided to install it on a spare partition in my personal laptop also.  Which leads me to a couple of things to brag about.

• Since Sector 11 has been asking...  This install took only 9 minutes from clicking "Install" to rebooting into the fresh new desktop.  Probably could have done it in 8 had the television not been stealing my attention.
• We don't need no steenkin network cable!  That's right, did the whole install sans network cable.  Didn't expect that to work, since my laptop sports the dreaded Broadcom wireless.  But I just staged a copy of the latest firmware to my Waldorf partition, copied it to the new VSIDO partition post-install, ran fw-cutter against it, and Bob's your uncle.  Then I was able to do the post-install dist-upgrade across wireless.  Any distro that allows me to do a full install without getting up off my lazy butt to plug into my router, is a fine distro indeed!

Thanks again for the wonderful work VastOne!

Next up, I plan to abuse it with FluxBox.   
[/list]

[VastOne]

Great to hear that tlinsley, impressive!  I also look forward to your FluxBox setup

Will you please detail exactly what you needed and had to do for the wifi and I will try to add that to the next build

Thanks again

[tlinsley]

Yeah, I do not entirely understand why it did not work "out of the box".  Your install places packages "b43-fwcutter" and "firmware-b43-installer" on the system.  Package "firmware-b43-installer" says in the description that it supports "BCM4322 (only 14e4:432b)".  According to lspci that is what I have.

Code Select Expand

tlinsleyvsido@vsido:~$ lspci -vnn -d 14e4:
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:432b] (rev 01)


Anyways, this is what I did:

• Downloaded the latest firmware from here: http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel.tar.bz2 to the "downloads" folder on my Waldorf partition.  Thumb drive would have worked just as well.
• Copied the VSIDO towo iso to a thumb drive per the how-to on this forum.
• Booted from usb into the iso.
• Ran the install, re-booted into the new desktop, and canceled out of the welcome script.
• Copied the previously downloaded firmware to my new VSIDO home directory.
• Executed these commands to install the firmware.

Code Select Expand

tar xfvj broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel.tar.bz2
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3/driver/wl_apsta/wl_prebuilt.o

• Restarted the system.  Could have done the modprobe dance here, but restart is cleaner.
• Upon login, wireless was detected and started by Wicd.
• Restarted the welcome script, which did the "dist-upgrade" and all the other magic.

All in all nothing too difficult.  Especially since I have done it hundreds of times in other distros.  For real fun, try making broadcom work in a Slackware distro.  Sheesh!


P.S.  Learned a valuable lesson in writing this post.  First write the post in Geany, then post it to forum.  Otherwise the dang forum expires the session and loses all you just wrote.  Grrrr. 


2013-10-24: Updated code box for b43-fwcutter to reflect latest driver name.  Instructions verified working on "vsido_raptor_64bit_2013_10_21.iso".

[VastOne]

Thanks for this tlinsley...

And also for letting me know about the timeout.  I was not aware of it since it does not affect the administrator... Apologies for that

I have adjusted it so it will/should not happen again

[Sector11]

@ tlinsley

9 minutes is good - especially considering the TV 

Just an opinion here, but if it ends in "box" it's not abuse.
whoa! did that rotten tomato come from the area of /root?

[dizzie]

Well done tlinsley!

Broadcom is a spawn from satan! been there done that, even with the right firmware and such, sometimes i even ended up with :
modprobe -r driver (take a sip of my coffee) then modprobe driver. One one of my systems i even had to use a tg3 driver (which is worse hehe)

I'll die a happy man if i dont have to use BC hardware again :-)

[Digit]

P.S.  Learned a valuable lesson in writing this post.  First write the post in Geany, then post it to forum.  Otherwise the dang forum expires the session and loses all you just wrote.  Grrrr. 

in every forum, repeat the mantra:

before every post, ctrl a, ctrl c.
before every send, ctrl a, ctrl c.
before every submit, ctrl a, ctrl c.
before every reply, ctrl a, ctrl c.
ctrl a, ctrl c.
ctrl a, ctrl c.

[tlinsley]

^^ Sage advice indeed!  And extra points for using keyboard instead of right click.   

[Digit]

alas, this no longer works for me.   vimperator... y u gotta break my existing binds.   ... i'll find the way with vimperator yet...

[statmonkey]

@tlinsley thank you much for posting that broadcom stuff.  Was about to put the latest on one of my lappy's and just wandered in here.  Had completely gapped on the broadcom business (last thing on it was a net install from way back).  You just saved me a lot of headaches.

[Digit]

heh, i'm glad i bumped then.

[surio]

Given this bumped thread is about Broadcom, I want to pitch in with my experience as well.

I have Broadcom 4313 and I had to resort to ethernet/networking cable during install as well as for some time post install before getting wifi to work.

I checked the packages list of VSIDO and see that this package (brcmsmac) is not present. It would be a good addition for augmenting existing wifi driver support in VSIDO.

[tlinsley]

@statmonkey - Awesome.  Happy to hear you are "headache-free".

@Yes I have heard the 4313 is the most evil of the Broadcom spawn.  Hmm looks like that package would add little overhead (54.3 kB) to the iso...

[VastOne]

I will add firmware-brcm80211 to the next ISO build...

Thanks for the input and suggestions!   

[tlinsley]

Just installed "vsido_raptor_64bit_2013_10_21.iso".  Awesome as always!  In the process of doing the post-install Broadcom Boogie, I discovered the driver name has changed in the latest "b43-fwcutter".  Updated the relevant post (reply #2 above) accordingly, in case anyone should find it useful.