I have installed fedora 12 in my laptop. My wireless network card is broadcom. I could not use the wireless facility even though I have installed the packages for enabling the wireless.

The enable wireless in the menu bar is always disabled and the service wpa_supplicant service that is used for connecting to wireless networks is not responding properly. If I wish to restart that service then it says that access is denied even though I login as root.

Please provide me a good solution for my problem.

Have you tried gnome's network manager?

I can't understand what you are telling. Please give a detailed description. Is there any service that should be started for connecting to wireless networks? The service wpa_supplicant is not responding.

Open a terminal, su to root, and enter "iwconfig". If it says "no wireless extensions", then you will need to install a driver for your wireless card. Broadcom is not the easiest, but there is a lot of traffic here on how to do it. Do some searches, starting with you package manager, then here, then Google.

If there is wireless, then try "iwlist wlan0 scan" (I have assumed that the wireless is on wlan0, but it could be something like eth1 (iwconfig tells you).

Before running iwlist, you may need to activate the connection.
ifconfig tells what is already up. Let's assume that eth0 is up:
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig wlan0 up

Ignore lo--it needs to always be UP

Doesn't fedora use system-config-network instead of the system that most distros use?

Briefly, wpa_supplicant quits unless there's a connection wanting encryption - nothing to do. Don't worry about that.

system-config-network is a python script for configuring this stuff, as pixellany has mentioned. The only way to get experience is to have a go. It will occasionally object to something quit in some magnificent splash of error messages, and you are to ignore the lot of them.

Start the NetworkManager service and it will try automagically under gnome.