e100 vs bcm43xx

It may seem odd to pit drivers for two very different cards against eachother, but I will give some background. I decided to try Dapper (yes, yes, I know, where's my faith...) on the old X30 recently. Everything installed reasonably well, but Ubuntu is certainly no "turn-key" solution either. After booting the beast, I noticed a few peculiarities: There was no eth0, even though the X30 has a bog standard Intel ethernet card. I noticed that e100 was loaded, so just for the heck of it, I removed it and loaded eepro100 instead. Still no go, but I quickly discovered that it had become eth1 instead (The ethX assignments to network cards in Ubuntu are rather fluid; on another laptop I've tested it on, the wlan and ethernet card swapped places between eth1 and eth0 after every reboot).

With the ethernet working, I proceeded to download the bcm43xx firmware and install it (It was less hassle to use a pre-packaged .deb than the cutout version I had on another Gentoo box). ifconfig up eth2, et voila!

A word of advice: the bcm43xx firmware doesn't really get loaded before you do ifconfig up. This means that iwconfig will not report any connection with any accesspoints before you've run ifconfig up.

After this, everything was working really until I rebooted. After the reboot, the interfaces stayed the same (probably a new feature of Dapper), but the bcm43xx card no longer worked. Hmm. Hmmm². The only thing that was different from last time was that now I was using e100, which was the default driver for the ethernet card.

Out with e100, in with eepro100, and things started working again. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonably explanation why the two drivers (e100 and bcm43xx) are conflicting, and I hope to figure it out one day, but for now I have some more pressing issues to attend to.