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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