gateway 200arc laptop FC3, broadcom bcmwl5 built-in wireless card problem
 

Hi everyone,

I've been trying for a while to get my internal wireless card to work using Fedora Core. I've installed ndiswrapper, and got most of it working. My card is a broadcom bcmwl5, and my laptop is a gateway 200ARC.

I followed the ndiswrapper install instructions (which you can find if you google 'ndiswrapper sourceforge installation' -- it's the first hit)

and got everything up to step 3 working perfectly. Then I try to bring up my wireless card (with alias 'wlan0') , using the following:

ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid moin

both these commands give me no error. But I cannot get online. The outputs of the ifconfig and iwconfig commands are given below:


>ifconfig

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:4B:2D:28:B3
inet addr:192.168.1.102 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::290:4bff:fe2d:28b3/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:45 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:6706 (6.5 KiB) TX bytes:1500 (1.4 KiB)
Interrupt:5 Memory:e0200000-e0201fff



>iwconfig

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"moin" Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:06:25:66:6A:6C
Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power:13 dBm
RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-27 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:631319 Missed beacon:0





I am using a linksys router, with no WEP key, for the moment, I plan to use a WEP key as soon as I can get this working without the key). The router's ip is 192.168.1.1, and my computer's ip for wlan0 is 192.168.1.102

sometimes I can ping 192.168.1.1, but mostly I can only ping 192.168.1.102. Either way, I can never ping anything outside the LAN, or go to google.com for example.

Does anyone have any ideas? I would appreciate any help. Thanks,

-Ali

Did you check out the distribution-specific instructions?

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/p...dex.php/Fedora

Near the bottom...

'Because the graphical Fedora configuration tools don't recognize wlan0, you can reconfigure ndiswrapper to use an ethX interface. If your eth0 interface is already configured for ethernet, you would use eth1.'

I notice your text says wlan0. Don't know if that might be an issue. Hope it helps, or points you in the right direction.

I did notice in passing that the same (or nearly the same) driver is mentioned in the text above that.

thanks for the info. I don't think the name will matter though, because the graphical tools actually do pick up the 'wlan0'. But I guess I'll try this tomorrow, and have a look at the distro specific page. Since I'm doing all the tweaking using the command line though, I'm not sure it'll work. But it doesn't hurt to try :)

nope, eth1 doesn't fix the problem, it's still the same as beofre (read the first message in this post). Help, please? Surely there has to be a way to make this work, I feel I'm so close...

here's an update. I was tweaking around, I changed the alias of the wireless card to eth1, and I set the ip manually using system-config-network to 192.168.1.104


eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:4B:2D:28:B3
inet addr:192.168.1.104 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::290:4bff:fe2d:28b3/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:176 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:177 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:42125 (41.1 KiB) TX bytes:20310 (19.8 KiB)
Interrupt:5 Memory:e0200000-e0201fff


Now I can ping the router at 192.168.1.1 but I still can't get online (i.e. google, or anything outside my LAN)... using the built-in wireless. If I plug in the ethernet cable, then I can go online, so it's still a wireless issue (not a general internet connection issue).

Hey! It works now!!! After having statically set the ip for eth1 and waiting a while I guess it started working... This is so cool. The only two reasons I had been keeping my windows partition was for dvd viewing and wirless, but yesterday I got dvds to work using the xine player, and now, finally, after four months, it looks as if wirless is finally working for me. Sweet.

Congrats. The only thing I've been in my Windows for since I installed Mandrake (in December) was to make a new Norton Ghost floppy. :)