Unable to set up a Belkin 802.11g Desktop Wireless card on FC5
 

Hi all,

I recently managed to install a distribution of Fedora Core 5 on my desktop computer and everything went okay exept for the Belkin 802.11g wireless PCI card. Curiously in the Network Configuration Manager I can see the system detects a Broadcom Corporation BDM4306 802.11/g Wireless Lan Controler and when I try to to setup the device under the device tab and activate it I get a:

"Determining IP information for dev1804289383... failed; no link present. Check cable?"

And if I attempt to set the IP number manually I have the following error message:

"SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
Failed to bring up dev1804289383."

Another thing that calls my atention is that the device Id is identify as dev1804289383 instead as something like eth1 or eth0 as I was expecting.

Not sure what to do or where to start looking for information, really any little help or advice will be highly appreciated.

Best

Dannt

I had problems with a Broadcom 4306 wireless card and had to install ndiswrapper & the drivers to get the card working under Slackware & Ubuntu.

Have a look at this website, hopefully it might help

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m....php/Main_Page

Thanks for this!
 

Thanks,

That's exactly what I am trying now, not so easy, but guess I'll manage to achieve something soon!

Best

Dannt

Dannt, which card is it you're trying to install? I have a F5D7010 and had the exact same problem with FC6 on my laptop. I'm guessing that when you try to activate it the lights don't come on, right? To get mine 'working' I had to use fcutter to set up the firmware, a google search should help you do that - I can't remember exactly how to do it now. You need to install the cutter package (I used yum for this), then run the command with an appropriate firmware file like bcmwl5.sys I think.

Then when you activate the card the lights should come on and you'll be away. My card didn't work properly though, it runs at 11MB instead of 54MB and seems to keep hanging. I couldn't get anywhere with ndiswrapper and I've been reading about issues with the kernel. I just noticed that you have to unload the bcm43xx module when trying to use ndiswrapper, I didn't do that so maybe I'll try that later on.

Keep us posted with how you get on.

Hi ST00

Many thanks for your response! The make of the card I am trying to install is a Belkin Wireless G Desktop Network Card and the exact number is F5D7000, I wasn't able to find out whether the card works or not with NsdisWrapper as I am struggling (a lot) to get it installed properly. I haven't checked the lights but the thing is that the Network Manager in FC5 recognises a so-called dev1804289383 where a Broadcom Corporation BDM4306 802.11/g Wireless Lan Controler is set, but when I try to activate it I receive an error message (...check cable?) I am fairly new to Linux, so I wouldn't be surprised I am doing something completely wrong.

I'll keep you posted about any progress.

Thanks

Dannt

Dannt, I got my card working properly with ndiswrapper last night. Here's what I recommend you do;

open a terminal and login as root using 'su -'

unload the broadcom driver module because it interferes with ndiswrapper

modprobe -r bcm43xx

install ndiswrapper if you don't have it installed already

yum -y install ndiswrapper

now find the windows drivers for your card (the ndiswrapper website has a list of compatible cards where you can find info on this), you want the .inf file I think, mine was bcmwl5a.inf.
Navigate to the directory where you have the driver and type

ndiswrapper -i driverfile.inf

(using my example it was ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf)

then type

ndiswrapper -l

and you should hopefully see a message saying that your driver is installed and the hardware is present (obviously your card should be in the slot :))

Now you just type

modprobe ndiswrapper

and this will hopefully fire up the lights on your card and if you type

iwconfig

you should see the info on your card. On my system it picked up the settings I had stored using Network Device Control when I was trying to get the card working with the bcm43xx module.

If all is well at this point, check the output of iwconfig to see whether your card is wlan0 or eth1 or whatever and then edit the /etc/modprobe.conf file and add this line at the bottom

alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

(change the wlan0 to suit your settings). You can do this with 'ndiswrapper -m' but it didn't work properly for me (I had to change the wlan0 part manually anyway).

Now you need to make sure that bcm43xx doesn't keep giving you grief so add the following section at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

# Prevent bcm43xx interfering with ndiswrapper
blacklist bcm43xx

Now you should be all set when you reboot, you should also be able to use Network Device Control to activate/deactivate/change settings.

Let me know if this doesn't work for you. Cheers, Stu

Hi St00,

I followed all your instructions, unfortunatelly when I come to this point:

This is what I get..

installed drivers:
bcmwl5 invalid driver!
driverfile invalid driver!

I'll keep trying to see if there is a way around this, let me know if you have any idea.:study:

Thanks

Dannt

Dannt, did you get the driver file from the ndiswrapper list of compatible cards? There are a few references for drivers for the F5D7000 on there I think, I would recommend downloading one of the others and trying with those.

Did you get any messages when you typed

ndiswrapper -i <name_of_driver_file>.inf

The driver file was in the same directory as where you issued the command from wasn't it?

Don't give up!

Cheers St00,

I got the driver straight from the card's original CD, it is the bcmwl5.inf, when I try "ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf" I get the following message:

"driver bcmwl5 is already installed"

I suppose this is because I've done the installation before, but when I did it for the first time I didn't read any error message as far as I remember. I've also tried to get a new driver from the Belkin site, but they have it in EXE format, however I uncompressed it in Windows and wasn't able to find any file with a .inf extension within the folders.

Thanks for all your guidance, and of course I won't give up until I achieve something...

Cheers

Daniel

Dear St00,

There has been some progress now! this time I tried downloading a driver recommended by the Ndiswrpper site (Rt2500.INF) and.. Eureka! I worked... and when I tried Ndiswrapper -l the driver was installed correctly, then I remove the old one to make sure there are no conflicts between them.
On the other hand the bad news is that I can't get rid of the old hardware device reconigse by the Network Manager (dev1804289383), I tried what you suggested to uninstall it, modprobe -r bcm43xx, but the F'?/+* driver is still there, (pardon my French!). Any advice on how to get rid of it?

Thanks

Dannt

Dannt, great news that you got your card working! Did you remember to do this step ...

Now you need to make sure that bcm43xx doesn't keep giving you grief so add the following section at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

# Prevent bcm43xx interfering with ndiswrapper
blacklist bcm43xx

The other thing to check would be what devices appear in Network Device Control. If you have the correct ndiswrapper device and this other dev1804289383 you could try deleting it from in NDC but I think I had a similar device that disappeared after a reboot once I'd blacklisted bcm43xx.

Hope this helps...

Hi St00,

Seems that I am getting there, the bcm3xx is now blacklisted, I rebooted the computer and in the Network Control I have a wlan0 with a Broadcom wireless driver controlled by ndiwrapper, but when I try to activate the Wireless network I have the typical "No link Present, check Cable?" error, which is funny because as far as I understand a wireless card doesn't require any cable, Does it?

I'll keep you posted of any progress, let me know what you think.

Cheers

Dannt

This is the most recent error message I got,

"ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper device wlan0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization."

What do you get if you type

iwconfig

Your card is working now right? From the output of iwconfig we should be able to sort out what's going on here - I hope :)

I am afraid the card isn't working yet..

When typing iwconfig, this the outcome:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.