Linux drivers and configuring the network card (wired and wireless )
 

I loaded Linux Fedora 8 on a windows xp home machine(making it a dual system) - Dell D510
AS I am a newbie to linux I would like some help on :

1. configuring a network card - being a newbie means some explicit instructions on the commands for doing this from scratch with no assumptions. In other words lamens langauge would go a long way.
2. provide link for the drivers for the network card . I am using dual os with the other being winxp home which works fine.
3. Where can I put my os name to boot up showing the respective os names.At present it goes to fedora and then says other system. I want to change that other to read win xp.

Thank you all in advance.
:newbie:

Whenever you are posting requesting help to get a piece of hardware working you should include information about the specific piece of hardware. You can get that information usually by using one of three commands.

lspci - Information about the motherboard and any cards plugged into PCI, AGP, or PCI Express slots
lspcmcia - Get information about a card plugged into a PCMCIA slot
lsusb - get information about a device plugged into a USB port.


1.)
In your case lspci would be appropriate. could you open a terminal issue the lspci command and post the output here ?

I'm rather surprised Fedora 8 did not automatically detect and configure the network card for DHCP.

I think your network card is a broadcom card, that would use the b44 module.
The wireless card in that laptop is also broadcom (BCM4318 AirForce One 54g) and would use the bcm43xx module or ndiswrapper.

Which one are you trying to configure ? and does lspci show my assumptions about your Network interfaces as being correct ?



2.)
Drivers for your Network interfaces should be in the Fedora repository, or already loaded.



3.)
/boot/grub/menu.lst is the file you would edit to change the Title from 'Other' to 'Win XP'
http://boff.wordpress.com/2007/01/17...rub-boot-menu/

The lspci command did not yield any results :
it says "bash: lspci :command not found I can not post the information here because I dont know how to its on a different pc

You will need to be root in order to use lspci or give the full path of lspci.

You are aware support for Fedora 8 will end in about a month?

Wifi Installation for Broadcom BCM4321 (14e4:4315) for Compaq V3791TU
 

I had attempted to enable wifi for my laptop Compaq V3791TU on Mandriva 2009 64-bit version for months until today. For the benefits of many in similar predicaments I outline below the steps that need to be carried out to avoid the pains.

Preliminaries

1. Open a console terminal
2. Type lspci
3. Find the details regarding your wifi hardware
4. Type lspci -n
5. Note the details of wifi hardware (in my case 14e4:4315)
6. If you are using Mandriva 2009 64-bit version, then search for Dell_multi-device_A17_R174291.exe using firefox and download using Ark compressing software) in any convenient location
7. Still in console terminal type cd /etc/ndiswrapper
8. Type dir and note any drivers that may have been installed earlier
9. Remove by type rm <filename>
10. To double-check type ndiswrapper -e <drivername> (in my case bcmwl5 without the extension .inf or .sys)

Installing the driver

1. Copy the extracted files bcm43xx64.cat, bcm43xx.cat, bcmwl564.sys and bcmwl5.inf to /etc/ndiswrapper
2. In console terminal (if you need to login as a superuser type su and enter your password) type ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
3. If no errors are reported, then proceed to restart computer
4. After restart open Mandriva Linux Control Center, enter root password
5. Navigate to Network & Internet
6. Click on Network
7. Now the wireless (wlan0) and ethernet cable (eth0) should show up
8. Click the wireless; and setup and connect

It should be up and running (Note: You may have to restart the computer for the network to be connected)

Hope this would be of help.