Wireless LAN cards for Fedora?
Bill Davidsen
davidsen at tmr.com
Fri Aug 1 02:00:38 UTC 2008
Nifty Fedora Mitch wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 06:23:10AM +0100, Colin Paul Adams wrote:
>> I want to connect an AMD64 machine (currently running 32-bit Fedora
>> Core 6, although I might upgrade to Fedora 9 64-bit or 32-bit) to a
>> wireless LAN. Can I just buy any cheap wireless LAN card, or are there
>> gotchas to be aware of?
>
> Wireless is a tangle.
>
> Not all work and not all parts have the same devices on the inside
> despite having nearly the same make and model on the outside.
>
> Is your machine a laptop?
> What wireless bands, frequencies, types etc are important.
> You are in the UK so my US centric history may miss the mark
> so here are some general thoughts.
>
> Have you done a net search and found:
>
> http://fedoramobile.org/wireless/
>
> you will find four types of card and some 32bit .vs. 64 bit issues
> to double the problem space.
>
> unsupported and unsupportable
> reverse engineered
> ndiswrapper over windows driver
> fully disclosed public driver.
>
> Shop for hardware in the fully disclosed public driver class that maps to your wireless
> needs. Look at vendor sites and write letters and email asking for
> Linux support if you cannot find it. Linux users do need some
> help from the wireless vendors.... some are stepping up so do look
> and do fill out the "was this helpful" survey.... Do it from
> each new DHCP address you get and from each 'hotspot' you visit...
> and all the throw away email addresses you have ;-)
>
> If you can find a supported/works USB wireless device you will find that
> to be the quickest to test. About 20% of the USB devices just work.
> A USB device can be very handy on the 'next' laptop. I have some that
> don't but were only $9.
>
> "lspci" tells me that this laptop has a:
>
> 03:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
>
> The driver is the b43 driver.
> "A Linux driver for the Broadcom b43 wireless chips. Broadcom never released details about these chips
> so this driver is based upon reverse engineered ..."
> http://fedorasolved.org/mobile/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras
>
> Wireless is the primary reason I have a 32 bit version of fedora
> on this laptop and not a 64 bit version....
>
Let's try again...
My Acer say:
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 USB Controller
(rev 01)
Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. Unknown device e003
and that doesn't work, even loading the b43, or b43legacy, or b44
driver. So now I have a lovely postable desktop, until I find a USB
wireless which works.
And until I find one I will have to try to get the WinXP driver working
in ndiswrapper. If there was a USB or PCMCIA which worked right I would
just forget about built-in, it's about 85% non-working and slightly more
working partially.
My fault for not going Intel, the ipw2200 stuff used in "Celeron" works
quite well.
>
>
>
>
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