Somebody in the thread at some point said: > Greetings but not happy ones at this point; > > I have a daughter dieing of cancer and I need to take my lappy with me, to run > roadnav among other things while I'm on the road and do email while there, > halfway across the country. Gah sounds horrible, sorry to hear that :-( > I just tried to boot my lappy to the newest kernel, and it got into a fight > with whatever the hell b43 is, looping through all sorts of Ooops messages > interminably. Somebody changed horses in the middle of the river here. > > So 15 minutes later I had to ctl-alt-del it and try the next one in the list > grub gave me. That worked fine because I'd had a chance to do an ndiswrapper > install for my bcm4318 wireless card. And that, despite all the ranting and > poo-pooing about linux purity, Just Works(TM). And that's what I need, not > excuses, hand waving and finger pointing. Well I don't agree ndiswrapper "just works", but I hear what you are saying. > Short of nuking the wlan0 stuff, is there any way to boot it past that and get > to a point where I can login and do the ndiswrapper install against this > newer kernel? > > With all the hardlinks somebody saw fit to put in there, you make nuking it > damned difficult. Make up your collective minds about where its supposed to > live and put it there. Then leave it the hell alone so we can get something > done instead of screwing around for 30 hours trying to get a 20 minute job > done. If starting up as a "single user" doesn't cut it (add 's' to the grub commandline) I guess the best way is to either pop the b43 mini PCI card out for one boot, or come up in the rescue environment. If you can boot the thing so you can edit files, then you can completely draw the sting of whatever ails b43 with install b43 /bin/true in /etc/modprobe,conf. It will still try to start up the logical network script like ifcfg-wlan0 or whatever but it will immediately fail in a relatively clean way if I understood it. You should then be able to run system-config-network and delete the network interface with the gui. > Or am I stuck with the older kernel 2.6.22.4-65 till 2.6.25 is out since the > b43 stuff somehow managed to miss the 2.6.24 merge window, and linux is once > again 18 damned months behind on what little wireless support it has unless > your people want to bypass the kernel tree? I think John Linville who is the wireless maintainer for the kernel and a Redhat guy is adding more recent stuff to the Fedora kernels than is in mainline, he has been in the past, anyway. -Andy
