[marktwothousand]

Hi all

I'm mostly a n00b, but my technical skills have allowed me to get so far as to install XBMC Live v.10 and v.11 on a thumb drive using UnetBootIn and boot it up on an HP dv9000 with no hard drive. The dv9000 uses a Broadcom 4311 built in wireless card.

Here's the major problem...I can't get the wireless settings to stick.

Under v.10, I couldn't seem to download the firmware-b43-installer through apt-get (it couldn't find such a package).
On v.11, I got as far as running wicd-curses, installing the b43 Broadcom drivers through apt-get, and getting my wireless connection working, and XBMC was fine and dandy.

So, when I got everything working on the v.11 version, and then reset the machine, all the configurating and work that I did to get the Broadcom b43 wireless connection up - was gone.

I'd rather run Live v.10 because the dv9000 is an old beast, but v.10 can't seem to find the b43 Broadcom drivers in its repos... so this whole thing has got me at a head here.

Either way, v10 or v.11, how do I get the wireless settings and b43 drivers to stick?

Help! Not at the pulling-out-hair stage yet, but trying to figure out what I'm missing.

[.:B:.]

b43 should be provided by the kernel. You can try Ubuntu's compat-wireless packages for more up to date versions (I'm sure Ubuntu has them somewhere, not an Ubuntu user myself though).

Instructions for compat-wireless on Ubuntu can be found here.

Where did you save your settings?

[marktwothousand]

I don't save my settings anywhere, I thought this would be done automatically with the installation of the b43 firmware. Where should I be saving my settings? Is there a script on the USB key I can edit on a Windows machine, before plugging the USB to the XBMC box?

So if I use compat-wireless, what would I do? Would I type "sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic", and that's it? Will it commit the changes to the USB key?

Also, compat-wireless' info page says to see if my wireless driver requires firmware. Since I am required to use the b43 driver, I have to install the firmware too. How does this play into all of this?

This is one of those problems where...someone who's done this before could fix this in a second, but this is my first try at installing XBMC.

[.:B:.]

You need to find out whether the USB installation is read-only or has some writeable partition it stores changes on. I can't help you with that unfortunately, I never tried any of the Xbmc Live CD's.