WiFi on Fedora laptops

[Erich Zigler]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 03:49:53PM -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:

>    This is hard because we lack some essential data, and no place to 
> find it. The first step is to name your wifi hardware on your computer.

I don't follow. I find once you know what chipset your wireless card
is wireless on Fedora is quite painless. For instance if I have a
Linksys WMP54GS I type in to Google...

linux linkys wmp54gs and it pops up in the first couple pages
ndiswrapper and that it is a bcm43xx chipset. From the ndiswrapper
pages I can figure out how to setup and configure the wireless driver.
If I choose to dig deeper I can search for linux bcm43xx and get a lot
of information on this issue. In addition I can do that with any
wireless card. My current card is of the Atheros chipset and if I type
in atheros linux I get madwifi. Do a search for madwifi rpm and I get
livna. It's really not that difficult, just takes some research skills
and the ability to type.

>    The second step is to determine which module(s) you need and what to 
> call the main one. I was fooling around with ipw2200 when what I needed 
> was ANOTHER kernel and the magic name ath_pci Is there anywhere a person 
> can get this information? I don't even know what to call it :-!

Please see above. If using one of the madwifi kernel module packages
from livna or freshrpms the user should not need to know ath_pci even
exists. I wouldn't call it a magic word by any stretch of the
imagination as the rpm's insert it in to modprobe.conf for you.

I can get my atheros card setup in 3 easy steps.

1. Install livna RPM to enable that repository.
2. Run yum install kmod-madwifi
3. Run system-network-config

I am sorry you are having so much difficulty.

- Erich