linux

I’m not misinformed enough to proclaim, “nothing changed, it just broke all by itself”. But, I don’t have any other explanation. My Wireless Card has suddenly stopped working in Linux.

I’m almost certain I didn’t have a kernel upgrade or software install in between the last time it worked and now because I remember upgrading all of my packages and doing a reboot afterwards. lspci shows my card in the list. However the bcm43xx driver doesn’t seem to operate it any more.

There’s no message in kern.log when I plug it in or take it out, which I expected there would be. One thing I didn’t try, now that I think about it, is pulling the card out and then doing an lspci to see if the card was still listed. But that wouldn’t have solved the problem, it would have only provided more information. I tried reloading the PCMCIA modules, but that didn’t help. I tried booting with it inserted and with it not inserted, but that made no difference. I considered upgrading all my packages again but I have no wired access here so there’s no way I can do that at this time.

If this were my only operating system I’d be sitting dead in the water. I’d have no personal computer and, if I used it for work, I wouldn’t be able to do my job. Thankfully, I have other options. The card still seems to be working just fine in Windows XP. Of course, my current use of Windows XP has other problems. But that’s due to my employer, not due to the software I’m running.

I’ll play with it a bit more when I get home and have some free time to waste (*choirs of angels laugh down from the heavens*). But, if I can’t figure it out fairly quickly, I’ll just continue using XP. It’s a shame. I really love Linux I just can’t deal with these kind of interruptions. I can’t tolerate wasting this much time just to get things to “normal”.