Wednesday 24 August 2011

Broadcom wireless on Arch linux

My wireless card is Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g. When Broadcom had not released open source drivers, I was using b43 drivers according to Archlinux wiki. These drivers worked fine till kernel version 2.6.37. From the next kernel version, it started trouble me as described in this bug. I switched to broadcom-wl and things worked fine once again. However, starting from kernel 3.0.x, each time I update my kernel, I have to recompile my drivers using

makepkg -f

and reinstall them using

pacman -U ./<package name>.xz

Now I can successfully connect to WPA networks; but not to WEP networks.

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Micromax USB Modem in Archlinux

Using Micromax 3G USB modem in linux is quite simple. You can use usb_modeswitch as suggested in this wiki article. However, I think only wvdial shall suffice. Start out with dmesg output or look in /var/log/dmesg.log.

dmesg

OR

cat /var/log/dmesg.log

I got the following lines as I inserted the USB modem.

[21003.558081] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 6 using ehci_hcd
[21004.356112] option 1-1:1.0: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[21004.356269] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[21004.356381] option 1-1:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[21004.356470] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[21004.356576] option 1-1:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[21004.356658] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[21004.356766] option 1-1:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[21004.356874] usb 1-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[21004.359305] scsi10 : usb-storage 1-1:1.4
[21005.364898] scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access     USBModem Disk             2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[21005.365401] sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[21005.367980] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk


I spotted the modem as /dev/ttyUSB3. So, I promptly modified my wvdial configuration to recognise this device.

Modem = /dev/ttyUSB3

The rest of the configuration of wvdial depends upon your ISP. You can look into my previous post for configuration for BSNL.