[clug] getting wireless card to work

David Tulloh david at tulloh.id.au
Fri Aug 31 08:58:36 GMT 2007


steve jenkin wrote:
> I got this in an email back from Julian (off-list) and wasn't able to
> help him..
> It's a simple apt-gt/dpkg config problem... ('error parsing proxy')
>
> This ubuntu page seems to be exactly right - and the errors Julian has
> been getting seem exactly "no module loaded".
>
> Can anyone help Julian??
>
>   
>> sudo apt-get install network-manager bcm43xx-fwcutter
>> Password:
>> Reading package lists... Done
>> Building dependency tree       
>> Reading state information... Done
>> network-manager is already the newest version.
>> bcm43xx-fwcutter is already the newest version.
>> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
>> 1 not fully installed or removed.
>> Need to get 0B of archives.
>> After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.
>> Setting up bcm43xx-fwcutter (006-1) ...
>> Error parsing proxy URL http://:8080/: Invalid host name.
>> dpkg: error processing bcm43xx-fwcutter (--configure):
>>  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
>> Errors were encountered while processing:
>>  bcm43xx-fwcutter
>> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>>     

bcm43xx-fwcutter uses wget (or curl in it's absence) to fetch the actual 
firmware files as part of it's installation.  So the error you are 
seeing is actually the wget error in that process.  Wget will 
automatically use a proxy server if the various _proxy environment 
variables are set (as Adam Thomas suggested), if you specify a proxy 
server on the command line (not the problem here) or if a proxy server 
is set in the wget configuration files /etc/wgetrc or ~/.wgetrc .

You can test this from a command line by trying out wget, something like 
`wget yahoo.com`
If that works for your account try as root in case it's a root user setting.
Check if it's the environment variable using `echo $http_proxy` (it 
should be empty).
If it's not the environment variable check /etc/wgetrc for a http_proxy 
line.
If you haven't tracked it down yet look through every file in /etc, run 
`sudo grep -R http_proxy /etc/` this will give you a list of any file in 
/etc that contains the word http_proxy and is much easier than checking 
all 2000 files by hand.  It should show up a handful of results and you 
will have to check each of those to find which one is your problem.  
Most of the results should be commented out lines for various 
applications (comments generally start with a #), this is normal.
When you do track down which configuration file is the problem just 
comment out the troublesome line.  You should be able to easily find a 
few other comments in the file to figure out how to do that.  The 
advantage of commenting it out is that it's much easier to reverse the 
change if it wasn't the problem or if it breaks things.

Happy hunting.


David


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