Haiku and a broadcom 4321 wifi board

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I have an oldish mac mini rendered obsolete by lack of software support from the manufacturer. I have successfully loaded linux on it and it works, but in a pedestrian fashion. I have now loaded Haiku on it and it has been given a new lease of life but I cannot get the wifi to work.

Having looked into things I see there are problems associated with the Broadcom boards fitted to these mac minis (mine is Aug 2009) and my simple question is whether the Broadcom 4321 wifi board fitted to mine is fundamentally compatible with Haiku. It recognises it in the device list and the firmware is up loaded but it cannot see, or connect to, my LAN by wifi.

Any thoughts appreciated.

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2

Buy a cheap supported usb wifi dongle and forget the integrated one.

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I was heading in that direction but wanted to make sure that I was not missing something simple or may be even missing something hard which I could use to get to know the workings of Haiku a bit better.

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Thanks extroverk for your response. Seems both of us have seen the same outcome from trying to get this board to work.

Does anyone know if there is a definitive list of wifi boards compatible with Haiku?

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The search function top right may can help.

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Tried the search and did not help me.

I have tried a cheap wifi dongle, Haiku recognises it and I now have a list of available networks.

All good, except Haiku will not recognise the password for my home LAN. I’ve tried enough times to be sure I have entered the correct password.

Any thoughts why password is not recognised?

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The obvious one is keyboard layout, if the password has complex characters. Have you tried typing in in StyledEdit to make sure there’s no issues with the Haiku layout versus what you expect?

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Good call… one of the first things I did was to type it into a text editor on the machine and it came out OK so I’m happy with the keyboard layout.

Any less obvious ideas? I’ve tried to set it up from a command line as suggested in the Haiku set up pages but that has not worked.

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Possibly unsupported hw. What kind of chipset does it uses?

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It appears to be a realtek RTL8192EU. Do you know if this is supported by Haiku?

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Essentially for anybody who might be exploring as I am and finds this thread…

I have found that the RTL8192EU is supported by FreeSBD and my understanding is that it should therefore be supported by Haiku. The fact that Haiku sees the adapter and offers available wifi signals to connect to seems to confirm this. Quite why it will not accept the password is a mystery.

I have another avenue to explore. On booting the mac min whilst holding the ALT key a screen appears allowing selection of any bootable drive. The screen also has a control which, on clicking, offers connection to available wifi signals. This route to wifi also rejects the password. I assume this is something to do with the mac BIOS.

Any thoughts welcome.

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Wrong password is the standard error, it does not neccesarily mean the password is wrong.

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To continue the story…

I have decided not to experiment with altering wifi passwords - too much kit is attached to the wifi and the prospect of none of that working and the potential for creating havoc is a bit daunting.

Having delved around the Haiku file system I am quite happy that the realtek chip driver is there having found a file containing the chip name.

This leaves me with the idea that the problem lies within Haiku itself. Even if I do not find the answer, at least I am getting to know Haiku and how it works and I am sure if I find a solution, then Haiku will be left permanently on the Mac Mini as a perfectly workable operating system.

I appreciate that the error message may be a convenient rather than an accurate description of the error.

Any thoughts on avenues to get to the bottom of the problem will be most welcome.

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The resonse in the linked thread is pretty clear:

The bwn driver has some pretty complex use of multiple busses on FreeBSD and is not presently supported by our compatibility layer.

So, if the developers say its not supported, its not supported. The fact that the name is listed somewhere does not change that, we have lists of names to show things in “listdev” and in Device preferences, that does not necessarily mean there is a corresponding driver.

For these broadcom devices we currently have the older bwi driver from FreeBSD: if_bwi_pci.c « bwi « dev « broadcom43xx « wlan « network « drivers « kernel « add-ons « src - haiku - Haiku's main repository

For most modern hardware the “bwn” driver from FreeBSD would be needed, and for now it was not ported to Haiku.

You can compare the list of IDs listed in our bwi driver with the one for your network card (as seen in listdev) to confirm that it isn’t supported. If you don’t know what to compare, you can share with us the output of the listdev command.

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Thank you for your comment PulkoMandy.

I have given up on getting the inbuilt broadcom board and the current problem I am having is with a Wifi Dongle. This uses a modern and common RTL8192EU chip which as far as I can see should be supported. Hauku now “sees” available net works, which it did not with the broadcom board, asks for a password to join the selected network but does not accept it. An authoritative statement that this is due to this chip not being supported, if that is the case, would be helpful. I have not found anything to support this.

I wii share the output of listdev when I next use the machine.

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RTL8192EU should be supported, yes. There are a few tickets about passwords not being accepted with some drivers, but nobody has really pinpointed a cause, and I can’t reproduce them myself (though I haven’t tried on very many networks.)

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Thank you Waddlesplash. So it should work! I have looked to see if there had been any other reported instances but I am new to Haiku and have not found my way around the wiki system.

Re listdev…

Struggling to get a print out of listdev - I have a bit of an ad hoc setup whilst trying to get things working, and without connectivity I cannot send anything anywhere. I have yet to work out how to put a file onto a USB!

Having looked at the list, the broadcom board is there as a network controller, but I cannot see anything related to realtek. I will work on getting a legible list which I can post.

Thank you all for your interest.

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Listdev printout. Have managed to get connectivity. Haiku supports tethering to my mobile!

~> listdev

device Bridge (Host bridge) [6|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0a82: MCP79 Host Bridge

device Memory controller (RAM memory) [5|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0a88: MCP79 Memory Controller

device Bridge (ISA bridge) [6|1|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aae: MCP79 LPC Bridge

device Memory controller (RAM memory) [5|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa4: MCP79 Memory Controller

device Serial bus controller (SMBus) [c|5|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa2: MCP79 SMBus

device Memory controller (RAM memory) [5|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0a89: MCP79 Memory Controller

device Memory controller (RAM memory) [5|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0a98: MCP79 Memory Controller

device Processor (Co-processor) [b|40|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa3: MCP79 Co-processor

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, OHCI) [c|3|10]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa5: MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, EHCI) [c|3|20]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa6: MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, OHCI) [c|3|10]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa7: MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, EHCI) [c|3|20]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa9: MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller

device Multimedia controller (Audio device) [4|3|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0ac0: MCP79 High Definition Audio

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Subtractive decode) [6|4|1]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aab: MCP79 PCI Bridge

device Network controller (Ethernet controller) [2|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0ab0: MCP79 Ethernet

device Mass storage controller (IDE interface, PCI native mode-only co [1|1|85]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0ab5: MCP79 SATA Controller

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Normal decode) [6|4|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0aa0: MCP79 PCI Express Bridge

device Display controller (VGA compatible controller, VGA controller) [3|0|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0861: C79 [GeForce 9400]

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Normal decode) [6|4|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0ac6: MCP79 PCI Express Bridge

device Network controller [2|80|0]
vendor 14e4: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries
device 4328: BCM4321 802.11a/b/g/n

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Normal decode) [6|4|0]
vendor 10de: NVIDIA Corporation
device 0ac7: MCP79 PCI Express Bridge

device Serial bus controller (FireWire (IEEE 1394), OHCI) [c|0|10]
vendor 11c1: LSI Corporation
device 5901: FW643 [TrueFire] PCIe 1394b Controller

device Unclassified device (Non-VGA unclassified device) [0|0|0]
vendor 0000: Unknown
device 0000: Unknown
~>

If I remove the realtek dongle, reboot, listdev, then I get the same print out.

If I replace realtek dongle, reboot, listdev and then explore with the “devices” app, I can find the Realtek dongle under one of the other controllers.

I wonder if the system is sending the password to the broadcom thinking that is the working interface and getting the error message because it is not working.

Practically I could test this by removing the broadcom board to see what happens. Problem is that the broadcom board is hard wired into the mac and buried deep. Physically removing it is not an option.

Is there a setting in Haiku which would disable the broadcom board and get the system only to use the realtek? I cannot find anything but I am new to the OS.

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It’s so great to have working and supported USB Wifi dongles in Haiku. My $9.50 realtek dongle was a plug in and go experience. Couldn’t have been better.

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