I've confirmed the card and hardware are good, but an update (late?) last week seems to have hosed the system when I have the wireless card installed. System hangs when the system appears to be attempting to brink up the network, and a couple lights start blinking on the notebook (caps lock and numlock I think). System boots fine without the wireless card. I've moved the Fedora drive over to an identical laptop with identical card and I get the same results. I pretty much install all the Fedora updates when I receive the notice that updates are available. Again, I am certain the hardware is good. Wireless NIC is an EW-7108PCg.

So, being a somewhat novice linux user, is there some way I can try to roll back recent updates to see if I can fix this? Or am I better off loading another distro at this point? This is a total bummer, I was so happy that I had linux and wireless working so nicely on my old notebook.

From what I can tell this is a PCMCIA or PC card, correct ?

Do a /sbin/pccardctl ident With card plugged in and and post results.

It just occured to me, after you updated, your problem is the driver for the PC card.
reboot your computer when the splash screen comes up , hit Enter and select older Kernel, and let it boot, and see what happens with PC card plugged in.

Hello pigwig

There have been quite a few sorry stories on the Fedora forum of the most recent kernel update that came out about a week ago. The only solution seems to be to boot the earlier kernel and wait for another update.

If you adopt that approach, you may worry that the next update will remove the earlier, working kernel.

You can edit the file:

and in particular the line:

to retain as many kernels as you have disc space for. You can see I have modified mine from the normal 2 to 3.

Thanks, running the older kernel seems to do the trick for now. I'll keep my fingers crossed that the bug gets fixed. Is this something that I should report in wherever they track bugs for Fedora?

Hello pigwig

If yours was an isolated instance then I would say report it. But there are more than a few bug reports already in so perhaps a wait and see approach would be more suitable.

That said, the bug reporting site is here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/

I read on the Fedora Forum that an update is expected shortly - whatever that means.

The release 2.6.24.3-34.fc8 seems to have resolved this issue.

Hello pigwig

I totally agree. The three machines that I have access to that had problems with the earlier 2.6.24 kernels have started working correctly with 2.6.24.3-34.fc8