WLAN Driver for HP W500 a/b/g

clacy317 · 04-01-2007, 08:23 PM

I have just installed Fedora Core 5 on my laptop, I wanted to be able to mess around with it for my Linux class at school. I am now unable to use my wireless connection.

Good thing I left XP on here or I would'nt even be able to get help here. If anyone could help me find a compatible driver it would be greatly apperciated.

scottblayney · 04-01-2007, 10:02 PM

type 'lspci | less' to find out what your wireless hardware is, if you don't already know what it is. I have an HP L2000, the output yields the following lines:

Quote:

05:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

From there you'll need to find out if your wireless hardware is supported or not. The wireless chip in mine is made by Broadcom, who don't make a Linux driver and who don't like to share their information with anyone, so I am forced to use a Windows driver with ndiswrapper. Anyway, find out the chipset first and you can move forward from there.

If you're not a die-hard Fedora user and you're new to Linux in general you could try Freespire. It has proprietary drivers built-in so it works from day one. I'm an Ubuntu users myself, but I've moved around a bit from distro to distro.

Scott