CentOS 6.2 BCM4312 working wifi howto

Linux on laptops has come a LONG way over the years. I am happy to say that most Linux installs for laptops go with very little or no issues. Recently decided to install CentOS 6 (but I'm sure this applies to RHEL 6 or SL6) on an otherwise decent Dell D630 laptop. My only issue was wifi not working out of the box. The "issue" seems to be mostly about the BCM4312 802.11 card in the laptop. Here is the easy fix:

1. Get the "updated" el6 b43-firmware rpm from the Russian Fedora guys. (make sure it's the *el6* version)
 

wget "http://koji.russianfedora.ru/koji/buildinfo?buildID=1041"

2. Install it (current version depreciates the b43-openfwwf package nicely)

yum install b43-firmware-5.10.56.27.3-2.el6.noarch.rpm

3. Wait several seconds and the wifi light comes on and wifi works!

I originally tried with the documented b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o but failed to extract the firmware needed.

I also looked into the kmod-compat-wireless but current information suggest, "RHEL6 packages are broken at present". Enjoy.

Here is all of the info from the BCM4312 card in question:

lspci | grep BCM
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

lspci -n | grep 14e4

0c:00.0 0280: 14e4:4315 (rev 01)

Original /var/log/messages indicated:

b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode15.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode15.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/...devicefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website.

Google Music Manger issue with .ogg file?

Had a very head scratching issue with the (at least the) Linux version of Goggle Music Manger. GMM claims to have uploaded all of the songs and produced some errors on some individual song titles. I didn't think much of the errors since the upload showed successful. I then went to the Google Play page to take the next step of creating some play lists. To my surprise, I only had the original group of files I uploaded a while back and the recently purchased songs from Google (practically a) give-way of albums from last week. I went back to look at the errors noted by Google Music Manager and deleted from disk the files that were named in the errors. I was left with a single error from the "Run Troubleshooter" option; and the error listed that had no filename and a error with just "Failed to upload". Kinda odd to find no filename... Finally noticed that after hitting "Apply" and "Ok" I saw a "0%" on a Al DiMeola song and went searching for it. Immediately after moving the file from the original disk location on my system, Google Music Manger had a little green icon turn on and Google Play began to see the songs. That Al DiMeola song was an otherwise legit and playable .ogg file. I can only suspect that GMM does not like OGG files at this point, but doesn't want to ignore them. Hope my pain is your gain with Google Music Manager.

Dell Server Update Utility (SUU) v6.5.3 64-bit CentOS/RHEL 6 problems

Just going to vent here for a minute, so stay with me...Why? Why would you have so many 32bit dependencies when running SUU on a 64bit OS. I mean Dell has already shown that OMSA for 32bit is not going to happen going forward. At least fix your own documentation for requirements... please.

So, to get SUU 6.5.3 functional on a 64bit CentOS 6.2 or RHEL 6.x server (and SL I bet), you *will* need to:

yum install pam.i686 libXtst.i686 libXext.i686 compat-libstdc++-33.i686 pam.i686

As noted in the comments by Carlos Capriotti, if you want to run the GUI stuff, you will need a couple more packages:

yum install ncurses-libs.i686 libXp.i686