Fedora 7 won't recognize my wireless card

(Question)

I have a Compaq Presario V2000 series laptop with a Celeron processor and 512 MB RAM. I have just installed Fedora 7 from DVD provided with LFY. However, after installing Fedora, I am unable to use my wireless network, as it does not recognize my inbuilt wireless network card. It works fine with Windows XP. Please suggest how to configure the same so that I can completely shift to Linux.

(Answer)

This is one of the most common questions that readers ask every time a new distro pops up. Here are the steps to get your wireless up and running on your laptop.

Your laptop comes with a Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI card. So, you need to have bcmw15.inf file. You can get this from the driver set-up directory on your Windows XP installation. Now, uninstall wireless drivers (if any) from your Fedora installation. To do this, run following command:

# lasmod|grep bcm43

If anything is returned by the above command, you will need to remove that by typing in the following command:

# rmmod

Do remember to blacklist the driver that you removed so that Fedora won't attempt to automatically load it in the future. Now 'yum install ndiswrapper' from the livna software repository.
After successful installation the ndiswrapper, run following command:

# ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmw15.inf
ndiswrapper -m
modprobe ndiswrapper

Next, check your /etc/sysconfig/network-script/ifcfg-wlan0 file; it should contain something like the following lines of code:

# Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless
1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card
DEVICE=wlan0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
type=Wireless

Do remember to do an 'ifup wlan0' and configure it according to your network settings.

From Linux For You Magazine (Q and A Section)
Organize by Vipin Sharma from New Horizons India Ltd
Senior Corporate Manager - Technical

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