I recently got a Compaq R3000Z laptop and installed FC3 on it. It seems to work pretty well overall but I can't get the built in Broadcom 802.11b/g wireless to work. I was searching the forums here for info and ran across a post by a guy who was looking for a laptop with wireless that came supported by FC3 (ie: didn't have to deal directly with fixes like NdisWrapper.) One person responded that his laptop's Broadcom WiFi card was supported by FC3 (without installing extra drivers I assume.)

Long story short, I want to know if and how my Broadcom 802.11b/g card can be used under FC3 (preferable by simply configuring it, not installing a workaround like NdisWrapper.)

Unlike the user whose post I just mentioned, my WiFi adapter is not automatically detected and configured by FC3 so I went to Applications->System Setting->Network and tried to add a device for it. The wireless adapter does not appear in the "hardware" tab (or Applications->System Tools->Hardware Browser for that matter, unless it is the nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 00d9) so I tried to create it when adding the device. The only Broadcom adapter that was available was "Tigon3" so I went ahead and gave it a try. Under transmit rate, "11 M" was the highest available transfer rate so it is apparent that this driver is for a different, 802.11b-only card. After adding the device, I tried to connect but with no luck. I get a message saying that "device eth1 does not seem to be present." The fact that the hardware doesn't even seem to exist as far as the computer is concerned makes me wonder. Also, there is a button with a light on the front of the laptop that turns wireless on and off. However, the light never seems to come on. The light could just be a worthless feature that is controlled by the OS and isn't used by FC3 (like the light on the mute button to show you that sound is turned off) but I do wonder if the card is even getting power under FC3. Any ideas on how to have FC3 recognize the adapter and how to set it up after that would be greatly appreciated.

By the way, the laptop is a dual boot setup and the wireless works just fine under Windows XP so I know that there aren't any hardware problems.

-Brandon

If it is the same broadcome 802g card as in the Dells, ndiswrapper works fine.

I'm sure it would but FC3 seems to have the ability built in. If I could get Fedora to use the adapter without NdisWrapper, I would like to.

Have you tried the Madwifi Driver?

I'm not sure if the Broadcom cards are supported, however it's worth a try.

http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/

It takes more work than just setting it up in the Network Config screen, however it works great for me. You can download it in Source or RPMS, I used the rpms.

Madwifi is a driver for the Atheros chipset. It's not an arbitrary Magic-works-with-anything-wifi-driver. Certainly, it doesn't support broadcom chipsets

Last I checked, there is NO native support for broadcom's wifi chipsets under linux. Your only option is to use NDISWrapper, or the commercial equivalent.

Yup, you are correct... well, partially anyway. FC3 includes support for the Broadcom Tigon3 (which is 802.11b I believe) but none of the other Broadcom chipsets. And, judging from their apparent lack of concern, I would doubt that Broadcom will ever release a WiFi driver for Linux. So, unfortunately, if you have Broadcom Wifi, you are out of luck and are stuck with NdisWrapper.

I saw your post and I am having the same problem. I have tried SuSE 9.1 and 9.2 Professional and no luck with configuring wireless. I am waiting for Linspire 5.0 to see if it works with that as I understand that it will, but dont want to spend $99 after spending nearly $200 on SuSE products with no success.

Have you found a work around to connect using the built in wireless on your machine, or have you been able to plug in a PCMCIA card and have it recognized?

Sure will appreciate your reply.
Thanks

Why did you spend money on linux software? There's no need for that.

You can get the broadcom wifi stuff to work. It's pretty easy. Read more about it.

Oh, and I just bought a Dell TRue Mobile card (it's orinoco) before I got my internal broadcom card working.