yesterday I tried 14a4 Flux edition in LIve mode - and Broadcom wifi drivers are there and all works fine.

However, today I do the same with MX14.3 and they are not - do different environment editions leave out certain drivers that are included in same versions ?

Pardon my ignorance - I am new to antiX
.... but old mepis was my first distro 9 years ago and used it for 4 years __{{emoticon}}__

MX and antiX use different default drivers for broadcom chips. The antiX defaults to using the open source broadcom drivers, which supports many older and some newer broadcom chipsets. MX uses broadcom-sta-dkms, which is a free driver released by broadcom that while supporting more broadcom chips out of the box, does eliminate support for some older broadcom chips. There are chipsets like the one in my dell that can use either driver kind of driver. For instance There are some chipsets that need to use b43 but can't use the sta driver, and vice versa.

There are actually a lot of broadcom drivers, but they tend to conflict with the sta driver, so in MX most of them are blacklisted by default. They are easy to re-enable though. The mx manual actually has a section on broadcom chips. usually it involves editing a text file and un-blacklisting the driver you want, and blacklisting the sta driver (which is called wl, for some reason) see
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.mepiscommunity.org/user_manual_mx15/mxum.html#toc-Subsection-8.7"
linktext was:"http://www.mepiscommunity.org/user_manu ... ection-8.7"
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for more info.

had to modify this response... kept getting php error

okay thanks dolphin... I read the manual part about the broadcom...
so the terminal 'unblacklist' is done after a complete install ?

There is also this bug on MX-14.3


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.mepiscommunity.org/node/147"
linktext was:"http://www.mepiscommunity.org/node/147"
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Servo wrote:had to modify this response... kept getting php error

okay thanks dolphin... I read the manual part about the broadcom...
so the terminal 'unblacklist' is done after a complete install ?

you can do it from live media, and the change will carry over on the install.

in the live session without persistence, though, you can't reboot. so we can modify the procedure a little.

all as root.

1. depmod
2. modprobe wl (this should load the wl driver, and your chipset might work. If not, continue to next step).
3. modprobe -r wl (removes the wl driver)
4. modprobe b43 (loads the alternate driver, You might need one of the other blacklisted drivers, but b43 is most common)

if the wireless then works, great. modify the / etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf file to blacklist wl and comment b43 (or whatever driver works). install and reboot. You could also use root persistence from boot, and then changes to the live media will survive a reboot just like an installed system. installing from root persistence will carry over any change not stored in the home folder, so it will carry over changes to the blacklist file.

okay -
will work with that info - maybe I'll keep the Flux version for now.

Thanks guys...