Professional Wireless Setup?
 

Okay, to be honest, I'm thouroughly confused about my wireless. I run a Compaq Presario v5119us laptop computer with Fedora Core 5 x86_64. This runs a Broadcom 4318 wireless card. This particular card should be natively supported by the broadcom 43xx driver, and is also well document as working with the ndiswrapper/windows driver solution.

I have tried at least four times ("tried" meaning "worked on for at least one week") on each solution, but I always arrive at one outcome. My card appears to work fine, it seems to be recognized by the OS, the correct nodes appear in /dev, and KWifiManager automatically picks the device. The problem? The card doesn't work. It just doesn't do anything. It seems to be recognized, but I can't scan for networks, nor connect to a network whose essid I know.

So here's my question - is there anyone who does this professionally? Do I need to look locally, or should I perhaps let someone in digitally through ssh? I can't seem to do it myself, and wireless is the only reason I keep Windows on this machine. I could reclaim over half my hard drive if I could get wireless to work, and I'm willing to pay a professional to do it. So... where do I find one?

You might want to try a local linux users group. I don't know where you are from, but a quick search on the net should point you in the right direction. If you are willing to fiddle with it some more, you might want to try the Ubuntu live cd, and see if it "Just works" with Ubuntu. They are famous for their wireless support. Something else you might want to check out, sometimes some wireless cards use different hardware underneath, even while keeping the name of the card the same, and the hardware actually used might not be linux compatable.

Best of Luck....

David

The important word here is should. If you do some rummaging around the bcm43xx site, you'll find that the 4318 chipset is actually very poorly supported by the driver. For the 4318, you're probably better off blacklisting the bcm43xx module and sticking with ndiswrapper.

The problem you may be running into is that you're running a 64 bit system. If you haven't already, I would suggest looking at the ndiswrapper wiki for advice on how to get ndiswrapper working on a 64 bit system. One thing to keep in mind is that you must use a 64 bit Windows driver. None of the 32 bit drivers will work.

Well, I'm in Charleston, SC USA and all the LUG's around here are defunct. I'm in the process of starting one, but it will be a while. I'm in the process of downloading the Ubuntu LiveCD. I never used it, if it does work, how do I figure out how Ubuntu configured it?

Being an owner of a 4318 chipset I would absolutely recommend blacklisting the bcm43xx module and going with ndiswrapper. Without knowing what card you have, I can almost certainly say that you could finagle at least something to get it to work in Fedora. In the absolute worst case last ditch effort you could even hijack the driver right from windows and give it a shot but browsing the ndiswrapper site should definitely give you some results.

You'll have the exact same issue in Ubuntu, by the way. You might as well not waste the time switching unless there are other issues.

Good luck

EDIT: I was hasty and might have sounded way too overconfident in my post here but you get the idea... :) I.E. you might not have the "exact" same problems in Ubuntu.. and there's no guarantee that ndiswrapper will work, etc. I also forgot to preface my post by agreeing with Hangdog42.

@Hangdog42: You wouldn't happen to know of any literature or forum that puts a timetable on 4318 being supported by bcm43xx would you?

I'm just trying the Ubuntu LiveCD to see if it autoconfigures correctly. I don't actually intend to switch. I tried running the driver off my windows boot, but it's a 32bit driver and I have 64bit fedora. Well, I'll try again I suppose.

Sorry for the stupid question, but did you try the 64bit version of Ubuntu ?

Perhaps it was a bad download, but the 64bit Ubuntu LiveCd won't finish booting. I'll try redownloading.

If there are any timetables, they certainly aren't any place obvious. There is a forum on the bcm43xx site (here) but there is not a lot of traffic there and it tends to be more of the "it doesn't work" kind of information. There is also a mailing list you can subscribe to, but I've never been that interested in the development.

Just an update - 64 bit drivers from an acer laptop with ndiswrapper from yum did the trick perfectly!