i'm getting desperate, and i'm hoping someone can help me.

i've used Fedora Core since about march, and i love it. however, i got a compaq presario 2500 notebook with a built-in wlan card, and now Fedora Core is useless to me because i can't get it to work. the card is a broadcom, which i've heard is very linux-unfriendly. i've gotten my windows drivers uploaded using driverloader, and i'm willing to pay for the license, except there is one problem: no matter what i've tried, my wlan card won't turn on. for those of you unfamiliar with the 2500, there is a button on the front used for turning the wlan card off and on, and while this works on windows, it doesn't work with Fedora Core.

there really isn't any more information that i can give. i really don't wanna give up on Fedora Core, or linux at all. if there is another linux distro that i could use that would make it work, i would gladly use it. i'm willing to even go as far as buying a new wlan card, something linux compatible, and preferably low on price, as i'm rather strapped for cash.

please help me. i'm rather new at linux, but i'm convinced that i'd rather use linux compared with anything else.

thanks.
matt

I think you should read Jeremy's interview http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=194667
with Jean Tourrilhes of HP, whom I believe wrote most of the Linux wireless LAN stuff. About Broadcom he specifically said, " The main offenders are TI and Broadcom, which
have Linux drivers internally, list Linux support on their web site, but are not releasing
those drivers and are not helping the community." This was in answer to Jeremy's
question, "Your top 3 best wireless chipset manufacturers? and your top 3 biggest offenders?"

Read the entire article. I've never tried to setup a wireless LAN, but the interview had lots
of new and interesting stuff for me.

If it is a broadcom chipset, many of them are supported by ndiswrapper or linuxant. Have a look at their sites and see if they could help.

Also have a look at Jean's website ->
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

Jean has a lot of useful information, but basically all i've learned is that broadcom is not supported in any way, shape, or form. i think i can get it running, but i have one problem. FC2 is not detecting my internal wlan card. if there is another distro that will detect it on install, i'd gladly use it, as long as i can run xfce4 on it.

The definitive site for laptops - http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ - has three listings for the Presario 2500. I had to use a proxy server to get anywhere - one gave me a 403 error, one a 404 error, and one has the setup using Slackware. He says he got it working, so why don't you surf on over there and see what's up.

I would make a couple of suggestions, but you may read and find them useless - I would not use Slack 9.0 but rather 9.1, and then use the bareacpi.i kernel choice so you don't have to recompile later just to get acpi support you could have gotten on the first install.

You may also want to go to http://lkml.org/ and read their notes about the new 2.6.x kernel and wireless. If it looks good, you could consider getting Slackware's latest development release, Slackware 10rc1 and check it out. That has a 2.6.x series kernel on the CDs.

EDIT: I just looked on my Slack 10rc1 CD and it has kernel 2.4.26 instead of 2.6.x - sorry. You can easily get the 2.6.7, which is the latest stable, from http://mirrors.kernel.org/

Not much more I can do to help you, since I've never attempted to install any wireless...

As I said, ndiswrapper or linuxant may do the trick as they support a number of broadcom chipsets. Have you checked those sites to see if either one supports your chipset?

Just thought I'd let you know that I have a new HP 54g wireless card built in and I use Linuxant's rpm with Suse9.1 and WPA encryption and it works very well. Its easy to use.
Let me know if you need any help.

Matt,

Did you look here? I think it's been suggested in this thread, and I noticed it's in finegan's sig
http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz

yes, i did see that chart. however, at the time, i couldn't make much sense of it. however, in the mandrakeusers.org forums, i found a post by a guy who had an integrated wlan card with the same chipset as me, and he got it to work on mandrake 9. so i think i'll give mandrake a try. thanks tho.

matt

Please post back what you do that gets your nic to work, so that someone else who searches will get the benefit of the answer. Help the community. ;-)