adding new hardware

[Cannon, Andrew]

-----Original Message-----
From: dbrett at tcn.net [mailto:dbrett at tcn.net]
Sent: 09 May 2006 22:46
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: adding new hardware


I have a laptop with a Broadcom wireless card.  The Broadcom website 
appears to indicate it supports Linux.  I don't know how to configure 
Linux to support the card.  When installing and starting up the wireless 
card is not discovered.

How do I add the Broadcom to Fedora 5?

david


---------------------------
David

I don't know about the Broadcom drivers, but I've had to use ndiswrapper for
my TI based wireless card (Safecom SWLC-54108) on FC5.  Unfortunately, I
have only got 128MB on the laptop at the moment, and whenever I do the final
stage of the installation (modprobe ndiswrapper), it starts swapping like
crazy and the system locks up (left it for an hour and it was still
swapping).  I'm waiting for some more memory to arrive before trying again
(unless installing in init 1 would be better...)

ndiswrapper is available from http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Note that I have not yet got this to work because of this memory issue.
Also, the default FC5 kernel is compiled with 4k blocks (I can't remember
the error message exactly, but it was something to do with 4k block size in
the kernel.) and the ndiswrapper script recommends that you recompile with 8
or even 12k blocks.  I have not yet got around to trying to recompile the
kernel, so I'll wait until I get the memory before I try again...

HTH

Andy

----------------------

In response to my own post, I did try it whilst running under init 3, and
the modprobe worked.   Unfortunately, the driver didn't.  The kernel is
compiled using the CONFIG4KSTACKS option (there is an underscore there, but
I can't remember where it is...) so I would have to recompile with either 8k
or 12k stacks for this to work.  The linuxant driver supplied by the vendor
also ran into this problem (along with some USB driver problems which I'm
trying to resolve).

When I feel brave enough to recompile the kernel, I'll see if that helps...

Andy

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