Comment 100 for bug 1065400

I'm on up-to-date Raring (stock 3.8.0-30.44 generic kernel) and my Thinkpad Helix (Broadcom BCM20702A0) may (or may not) be affected by this issue. Christophe, is your 3.8.0-31 Raring kernel from one of Jesse's "+bt01" packages at http://people.canonical.com/~jesse/lp1065400/ ? Or from Raring's "proposed" repo? Or custom? While I'm not sure it will make a difference, I'd like to be using a known-to-work kernel before I do additional testing with the firmware image itself. But I'm not yet ready to upgrade to Saucy....

Anyway, I'm getting "can't load firmware, may not work correctly" errors (as I have for a while). I assume this same error cover both of the following failure-cases: 1) kernel does not attempt to load firmware, and 2) there is no appropriate firmware in /lib/firmware. Is that correct?

Following the instructions in Karl's post (#84), I created a fw-0a5c_21e6.hcd, placed it in /lib/firmware (not /lib/firmware/brcm) and rebooted. It does appear to load, but breaks bluetooth even worse. (I had to reboot into Windows and "upgrade" the bluetooth driver, which got me back where I started.) After reading post #95, I tried loading the firmware manually (sudo brcm_patchram_plus --patchram fw-0a5c_21e6.hcd hci0), but that failed as well ("port hci0 could not be opened, error 2").

So, three questions:

1) Am i already on a known-to-work Raring kernel? And, if not, how can I get one?

2) If/when I _am_ on a working kernel, do I still have to roll my own fw-0a5c_21e6.hcd and put it in /lib/firmware?

3) If so, is there a more reliable way for me to obtain that .hcd file? The [Wine -> SetupBtwDownloadSE.exe -> extract BCM20702A1_001.002.014.0889.0897.hex from Temp -> hex2hcd] method does not appear to be working for me.

Meanwhile, thanks to everybody (especially Jesse) for all of your help with this issue.