Is wireless support any better with FC5?

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Wed Apr 19 17:17:52 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 19 April 2006 11:01, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>For me FC5 has been an absolute nightmare for wifi.  Everything worked
>perfectly for me with a orinico supported pcmcia wifi card in FC4.
>Since upgrading, I can't get it to work at all.  The card is detected,
>yet it never can connect to anything on any network.

I just did get it working here, on an hp lappy with a broadcom 4318 
chipset in it.  I used a combination of kwifimanager and hand editing 
of various files to get ndiswrapper running with the drivers from the 
XP install also on that lappy.

I used a tool called wap11gui (cause thats my access radio) to generate 
the keys, and applied those to the keys-wlan0 file in network-scripts, 
disabled eth0 on booting, set the ESSID strings to match on both ends 
of the radio path, and its working fairly well now.

kwifimanager apparently cannot write to the keys file or even to 
ifcfg-wlan0, so I had to do that bit by hand.  IMO kwifimanager, while 
pretty, needs more developent to be able to handle all that.

FWIW, system-config-network is a heck of a lot more broken than 
kwifimanager.  It may be able to properly setup an ethernet port, but 
don't EVER let it touch a wireless setup.  It knows nothing about 
ndiswrapper at setup time.

>On 4/19/06, James Pifer <jep at obrien-pifer.com> wrote:
>> Is wireless support any better with FC5?
>>
>> I'm on FC4 now and have been using ndiswrapper with a Broadcom card
>> for some time: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN
>> Controller (rev 03). Recently my DLink DI-624 router died and I just
>> got the replacement. Now I can't get FC4 to reconnect. I can scan
>> the wireless network and see it, but I can't connect to it.
>>
>> I've also tried two PCMCIA cards, a DLink DWL-G650 with the Atheros
>> chipset (I've never got this to work) and a CompUSA card with an
>> unknown chipset (doesn't work either).
>>
>> I've also never been able to get WEP to work, so I've been stuck
>> using no encryption and filtering MACs. I would filter MACs anyway,
>> but would really like to use WEP, even though it's not the greatest
>> security.
>>
>> All three of these NICs work fine when I boot to Windows XP.
>>
>> So I'm wondering if FC5 improves anything. I've heard that SUSE is
>> much better at handling wireless, but I really like Fedora/Redhat.
>>
>> Any suggestions are appreciated.
>
>--
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
>LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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