Installing Wireless Ethernet in Fedora (Netgear WG311)
 

Hello all,
I'm fairly new to Linux (I have used it some in my computer lab, but have never run it on a home system). I have a computer with Fedora 2 installed and a regular ethernet card in it, but I needed wireless capability so I bought a Netgear WG311 wireless PCI card. I plugged it in and rebooted, hoping that kudzu would take care of everything for me (like a linux newbie) but the card isn't even recognized as new hardware. How do I go about installing this card, getting drivers, and getting it up and running? Please be specific, as I have never added new hardware to a running linux system.

I might add that I have the V2 of the wireless card. I think it might be harder to install, but I thought I read somewhere else about using something called a ndiswrapper and getting V2 to work, but I don't know what that means, or how to get started, so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
ricka

Hi ricka welcome to LQ

Not used the card personally but this article may point you in the right direction, about half way down the page are some useful links Link

Pete

Thanks for the link Pete, but I'm afraid I still don't know enough about linux to set me straight. That article warns agains using ndiswrapper, but it seems as though a lot of people on here have had some luck with using that. I also can't seem to find out much else about that acx100 driver and it also seems pretty experimental. One way or another, I can't figure out how to get the drivers or install them or what steps to take after that. Also, what exactly is CVS? I'm sorry to have to get babied through this, but you have to start somewhere! Any help?

Well ricka I'll try, I,m no wireless expert but here goes

Go Here

Download "acx100-0.2.0pre8_plus_fixes_29.tar.gz" into a folder in your home directory

Uncompress the file, on the command line navigate to the folder where you downloaded it and run
"tar -xzvf acx100-0.2.0pre8_plus_fixes_29.tar.gz"

This will give you a new folder "acx100-0.2.0pre8_plus_fixes_29"

Navigate to this folder "cd acx100-0.2.0pre8_plus_fixes_29"

Then enter "vi README" and you guessed it read, navigate through the document using UP or DOWN keys, to exit vi enter ":q"

The simplest way to build the driver and check if you have all the necessary components and Kernel options in place is simply run "make" on the command line while still in the acx100-0.2.0pre8_plus_fixes_29 folder, if it fails you will get a list errors which you will need to correct, if it succeeds then we'll move onto phase 2

That's a start for you, let me know the outcome

Pete

Ok, I've started getting somewhere, although the README is very vague. My first problem is that my PATH variable isn't setup correctly. None of the sbins (/sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin) are in there by default (can someone help me with this?) After seeing that, I got everything to make (I hope) and went into the scripts folder and ran the start_net script and success! Sort of. After my path had been temporarily altered, I tried commands like ifconfig and iwpriv and see another adapter called wlan0 up and running. The only thing now (I think) is that start_net works if you use a static IP, but when I edit the script to use DHCP, I get "dhcpcd: command not found". And even if I get that to work, I still feel a little lost about what exactly I'm doing. Pete? Anyone? Bueller?

By the way, thank you so much for your help thus far!