Curious issue with "b43" Broadcom on Dell Latitude D630...

MikeWalsh

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Hi, guys.

I'm noticing something odd with this D630.

It's got a total of 4 USB ports, but I really need 5. I DO have a PCMCIA card with an additional 4 ports......but this is where things get a bit weird.

The machine has Broadcom wireless, which uses the b43 driver.....OK? The machine has a PC Express card slot, and the card IS the correct type for the slot.

If I plug the PCMCIA card in the slot, then boot up, the card is recognised fine initially. However; as soon as the Broadcom wireless card connects.....the PCMCIA card promptly quits working!

Apparently, both run off the PCI bus. In almost 40 years of messing around with these boxes of black magic, I have never had this happen. Both components are recognised and supported by the kernel.....one starts working immediately, yet when the second one starts up, a minute or so later, it causes the first one to STOP working.

Anybody got any ideas? Remember; I run Puppy exclusively, and some of the 'standard' mainstream trouble-shooting utilities won't function here.....due to Pup's compile of Busybox running with a reduced Bash "instruction set". (Blame our devs, not me!)

I may have to end up buying a mini-PCI hub, though in all truth I only need a 2-into-1 USB adapter.....at least there's plenty of them about. I'm more curious than upset or annoyed.....just a bit miffed that a perfectly functional piece of equipment is apparently being disabled by summat else.


Mike. ;)
 


My Dell Insperon also has the B 43 series Wi-Fi and using the kernel drivers it's never missed a beat, try uninstalling and re-installing the BCM43 kernel drivers
 
Wild speculation: Maybe an IRQ collision? I haven't had to deal with that in forever and a day, but the term (+Linux) may yield some fruitful results.
 
MikeWalsh asked:
Anybody got any ideas?
Do the logs provide any clue as to why the card becomes null? Perhaps run "dmesg -w" and watch any changes.
 


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