Hi ive just downloaded and installed fedora 7 and i used to have FC5 installed many moons ago and my wireless worked fine. so i tried setting up my Wifi using the bcm43xx module and the ifconfig... all the usual stuff but when i tired to ping it said network unreachable. so i went down the route of ndiswrapper which then gave my device( HP Laptop integrated broadcom) the alias Eth0 which then worked fine and was configurable via the networkmanager. I left it on when i went out to work and when i got back the network had died. So i tried a reboot and when it came back on the wifi card had resorted back to wlan0 so i tried removing all the ndiswrapper drivers and reinstalling them with no luck. I was just woundering if there was another way to make wlan0 eth0. another thing in network manager when i try to activate the eth0 connection it comes up with some problem about a module not being able to load but as im on a different OS at the moment i cant remeber the actual name of the module(something like bc501 i think)

i think the module that doesnt load has something to do with Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 UART (rev 01)

i remeber seeing UART and thats from the HCL:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...t/3734/cat/202

Cheers in advanced for your help.

Welcome to LQ!

A few things to consider:

- When you started with bcm43xx, did you install firmware? Due to licensing problems, only the kernel portion of the driver (the bcm43xx module) is included in most distros. End users have to create and install firmware with fwcutter. It isn't hard, but it is required for the card to work. Unfortunately, without the firmware, the card kind of looks like it is working but never does.

- You can't have ndiswrapper and bcm43xx loaded at the same time, so check the output of lsmod to make sure. I've seen a number of instances where blacklisting bcm43xx hasn't really worked for some reason.


You can use the if_name flag with ndiswrapper to call it anything you want, so run this:

modprobe ndiswrapper if_name=eth0

However, you may be causing a conflict if you've got a wired ethernet port that is also being automatically picked up. It may already have the eth0 name, so check the output of ifconfig first.

Right tried all that i seem to be getting a little bit further i just have a problem with the dhclient first off all it seems to work ok but upon pinging the deafult gw it just times out (in my case 192.168.2.1) ive checked all the setting since im back in windows its just occured to me is the ESSID case sensitive. ive rmmod all the BCM43xx modules befor starting with ndiswrapper the default wired ethernet is ETH1 in my fedora installation when setting the if_name to eth0 it is seen by the network manager so i seem to be getting further than before.
Another question is since installation of ndiswrapper i seem to have to kernels present in the grub boot loader so i will have a go with both kernels and see if one has anymore success than the other.

also i used my windows bcmwl5.sys file to get the firmware and when i try using the broadcom drivers the dhclient comes up with some error about wmaster0 (I think thats correct ill hook it up2 the ethernet tomorrow and get all the outputs if you want.

cheers

With Fedora try using ifup eth1 (or whatever eth the wireless card is called). It tends to work better than dhclient.

You shouldn't have to rename eth1 to eth0, either should work. If your network manager isn't seeing eth1, you might have a look in your log files (/var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages and the output of dmesg) and see if ndiswrapper or the network manager are leaving any clues.
Try looking for a file called wl_apsta.o (either google for it or check my help site), it tends to have better/newer firmware than the bcmwl5 files. Of course if you're using ndiswrapper, you don't need to cut firmware, you just need the .inf and .sys files.

Linux newbie.... sorry for the dumb question, I've been trying my best to do this by myself, but I need some detailed walk-through to get this right.

I have a Dynex modem that isn't working, and it seems like the same problem reported in this thread, so I'd like to try following the steps to install the proper drivers. I'm using FC6.

Please explain how to follow these "simple" directions: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_BCM43xx

I've downloaded the appropriate files. I get confused starting with the section called "Kernel Configuration".

How do you:
1."Enable the following options in the kernel" what command brings up that kernel config?
2."then build and install as normal..." what's the normal way to build and install that program?
3. Later, it says "reboot to your new kernel..." do I have to do anything special other than reboot the computer?

This seems like very advanced stuff; I just want to get my modem working.

Thanks for any help.

Just so we don't get off on the wrong direction, are you referring to a modem (as in it works over the phone lines) or a wireless Ethernet card?

Don't worry about the kernel configuration, the stock FC6 kernel almost certainly has bcm43xx compiled as a module. That bit is really meant for people who compile their own kernels. If this is a wireless card, then you'll want to pay attention to the part about using fwcutter to get firmware from a Windows driver. I've got a section on doing this on my help website (link is in my sig). Maybe a different set of words describing what to do will help.

Thanks Hangdog,

I've followed the instructions on your page for fwcutter. I got wl_apsta.o and used fwcutter to get a bunch of .fw files.

So it's just the last step that's giving me an error: I run (as root) make installfw and I get this error:

make: *** No rule to make target 'installfw'. Stop.

Any ideas why?

Thanks for your help.

ps: yes, it is a Dynex DX-WGPDTC, a wireless LAN 802.11g Enhanced desktop card

Hm. Its been a long time since I ran fwcutter, so it could be they've changed the command. The upshot is that all of those .fw files need to be moved to /lib/firmware, and all the make installfw did was copy them over. You can do that by hand just as well.

Of course if there is a README or INSTALL file with the fwcutter, it might tell what command replaced make installfw. My bet would be just plain old make install.