Wireless Woes Sabayon 3.4

[Anakist]

As much as I hate to make a new thread I can't find a solution with google. I have an Acer Extensa 5620Z which has the Broadcomm 4311 card in it. Comes up as 14e4:4311 in lspci -n.

I can connect to my router using this:
http://wiki.sabayonlinux.org/index.php?title=Using_Broadcom_wireless_and_ndiswrapper_w/Sabayon_miniEd

[MostAwesomeDude]

This is Gentoo, not Sabayon.
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[Anakist]

Yeah I know. Sabayon is made on gentoo. In all the things I have read it says to use gentoo commands and syntax.

James

[MostAwesomeDude]

Yeah, Sabayon is based on Gentoo, but these forums are not for Sabayon support. I'll try to help anyway, though.

So, manually configuring the network works, but using NetworkManager doesn't? Is that the problem?
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[Anakist]

Yep thats it.

Thanks.

James

[Dagger]

why to use gentoo clone when you can use gentoo??

anyway can you post some of your logs?

[bunder]

Moved from Networking & Security to Unsupported Software.
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[hirakendu]

the broadcom wireless works fine only with ndiswrapper uptil kernel 2.6.22. just make sure that indeed its using ndiswrapper driver and not the bcm43xx kernel module (see 'lsmod | grep bcm'). if the bcm43xx module is loaded, the device uses this driver instead of ndiswrapper and doesn't connect. you can blacklist bcm43xx from autoloading by adding the line 'blacklist bcm43xx' in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and run 'update-modules' (and then either reboot or run 'modprobe -r bcm43xx', 'modprobe -r ndiswrapper', 'modprobe ndiswrapper'). Networkmanager runs just fine. I would suggest nm + knetworkmanager rather than using the gentoo networking scripts.
i would also suggest trying with different encryption schemes on your router. for safe, i would suggest wep instead of wpa and open system instead of shared key.

ps : i have seen that stereotype reply myriad times - that sabayon problems have no place in gentoo forums. okay in letter but not in spirit . please treat the problem to its merit. sabayon IS gentoo except for useful minimal changes. problems in sabayon are most likely to be found in gentoo also and vice versa.
also please don't try to give an impression that all your problems will be solved if you use gentoo instead of any other distro. while thats 120% true (indeed, thanks to the gentoo developers, many of the things work flawlessly like magic for which one has to break their head in other distros), often it leads to disappointment for newcomers who expect way too much after making their machines toil for more than a day of emerges .
anyway, fortunately there is the unsupported section, and you can expect quite a lot here .
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[wolfden]

[mjf55]

If the question is still unresolved, I would say that as a former Sabayon user ( 3.4f ) I would NOT use networkmanager and have always advised against using it. This is / was a common source of problems in the Sabayon community. If you search the Sabayon community you can see this for yourself.

other editorial comments raised:
Why use Sabayon? Because they have an installer that works. I used it before I could install my own Gentoo system running.
Why leave Sayabon? Sabayon is bleeding edge uses ~x86 as default in make.conf. This caused me many upgrade problems. Baselayout2 and issues with 'must have programs' caused my system to break and I was not able to recover.
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Mark
No longer a n00b, but still a 'Kool Kid' wannabe

[hirakendu]

About the wireless part. I personally have a dell 1390 wireless card which has a broadcom chip (bcm4311) and use gentoo with networkmanager backend and knetworkmanager frontend and it works fine. Hence the suggestion. Also for this wireless card, the bcm43xx driver from kernel not only does not work, it doesn't allow ndiswrapper to work when loaded.

PS : When using networkmanager, please disable gentoo's networking init scripts. I agree earlier versions of networkmanager etc might have been a bit flawed, may be a year ago. So if you haven't tried it since a long time, I am sure you'll have a pleasant experience this time. I have been using knetworkmanager since may 2007.

And even though I have used gentoo's init scripts for setting up network for a long time, right now it feels so caveman . Sure gentoo way is simple, but networkmanager is simpler. Problem is that i dont want to be sitting in an airport doing 'iwconfig', 'iwlist scan', and then editing '/etc/conf.d/net' and/or '/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf', and doing '/etc/init.d/net.wlan0 restart'. And even after that, if its a tricky set up and you haven't dealt with it before, chances are you might not get it right the first time. So it requires a bit of experience.

And I must add that knetworkmanager also has occassional hiccups. I have so far just used only ipw3945 and bcm43xx chipsets. I have heard reports that its pretty sensitive to the make of the chip and driver too. Example, for ipw3945, the driver 1.2.0 works smooth, but 1.2.2 takes some time to connect and may be even multiple tries.

Also, most of the networkmanager related issues are not due it, but funnily due to the program that does the dhcp part - dhcdbd. Most of the connection issues happen in the last step - getting an ip address via dhcp even after connecting to the router. Fortunately, gentoo uses dhcpcd and its flawless.

And that brings to an interesting point. In spite of calling gentoo networking tools caveman, its the only thing that always works (when knetworkmanager doesnt sometimes )!
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[hirakendu]

About the Sabayon support issues. I must clarify that indeed unsupported section is the only place for sabayon issues. And most of the times moderators say it plain and simple. Unfortunately, sabayon users take this in a bad taste possibly because of their assumptions about 'unsupported' section that its possibly 2nd tier treatment, though its NOT. Many / most gentoo users keep lurking in this section.

And I say that its the only section thats politically correct for sabayon, because officially allowing them in regular sections will send a somewhat wrong message that sabayon is officially supported by gentoo. Of course we feel responsible for the gentoo part - and theoretically, should be happy to help about any program thats present both in sabayon and gentoo, hopefully unchanged. And we surely can't help about sabayon specific stuff like 'entropy' etc, and I haven't fortunately seen anyone do that either . So all is good.

The only part I was suggesting was that Sabayon users (or any other distro users may be) in gentoo forums shouldn't be rudely told to 'stay away' or 'go away' or similar . It also sometimes heats up to the extent of aggressively marketing gentoo . Although advertising for gentoo is ok (though I personally don't even do that - in fact i dont even advertise for linux! just make things work ).
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[hirakendu]

(And another!)

Also, it is humanly impossible to convert a sabayon to gentoo and not worth the effort. And even if somebody can, I guess s/he has enough gentoo/linux skills to be better off starting pure gentoo way . It might be fun for an experience though for a gentoo predator. I have heard about installing THE latest sabayon and immediately doing 'emerge --sync' and 'emerge --update world' or similar may be, though I haven't tried the same and doubt that it will work.

What I am curious to know from sabayon users is that - is it possible to live an eternal life of smooth upgrades with sabayon (as you can with gentoo / debian). I doubt that its even easy to maintain a sabayon system for a new linux user with not much idea of gentoo tools and mechanism.

There is nothing wrong with '~x86' keyword. I have always used ~x86 ever since I started using gentoo. With 'x86' stable, you are sometimes left with 'debian stable' like system (which is more stable and consistent than debian of course) . The problem is not with ~x86 keyword in sabayon, but the enormous amount of changes they make to portage. Their use flags, profiles, overlays and what not.

Sabayon unchanged works like magic though.

(PS : Please don't take this as sabayon fud. Its just my own experiences.)
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[wolfden]

World updates are no different than the pure gentoo - I do it all the time and only problems I run into are the same ones Gentoo runs into. Last run in I had was the portage and bash blockage, same as the rest of the gang. (32bit version)

Converting to "Gentoo" really isn't an issue either. I know people who are running out of both branches that run pure Gentoo.

Professional Edition is built on stable branch already and easily world update able too. I run the 64bit of that version too.

I agree that the Unsupported section is the only fair place to be.

[kernelOfTruth]

[Dagger]

honestly "average" user who is only seeking answers to his questions hardly ever visits unsupported software section Personally I treat this section as for a bit more hardcore users who wants bleeding edge systems. Lots of stuff which isn't in official portage can be found here. Also I presume you can get better support here than anywhere else.

but I think we went a bit off topic

Anakist is there anything we can still help you with ?
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