Setting up Wireless card

[TheCrow]

Hello everyone, I've been driving myself mad with this over the past couple of hours. I'm not completely new to linux, but I often get lost with most of the concepts so please keep your answers basic. I have a linksys wireless g card for my desktop. I can't seem to find any method of getting it to work with my version of Fedora Core 7. I just installed Fedora a few minutes ago, and I can't quite figure out everything. When I tried to setup that popular windows driver emulator (ndci or something like that) I was unable to use the command make and make install. make Install produced an error, and I followed all the instructions straight off of their website. I figured out that this may be because I don't have the source of fc7 installed, and went to add/remove software just to find out I need an internet connection to make it work :(. I couldn't find the driver for the card in the predefined drivers, Can somone please help me out with this. Tell me how to setup that emulator and how to set up the network.
Thanks in advanced,
TheCrow

[stoat]

Hello TheCrow,

It's ndiswrapper that you're interested in, and it can be installed with yum instead of compiling it from source. It acts kind of like an adapter between the Windows driver for your device and your Linux system. If that's a WMP54G with a 43xx chipset that you have there, it works with either ndiswrapper or the native Linux Broadcom drivers. I sort of wander back and forth between the two methods. Currently, I'm partial to ndiswrapper.

Since this is a desktop computer, that means that there has to be a router somewhere in the house unless you are planning to connect to a neighbor's. Can you possibly get those two things close enough to connect by wire and download what you need from the Internet?

[TheCrow]

I could possibly move the computer into the other room, but I've done that alot of times this week, just trying to download stuff onto it. Yes I do have a wireless router and yes it is that same card you mentioned. You said it could be done with the linux broadcom drivers. How is that done? I tried to setup a wireless card through the network manager, but it didn't work. Mind explaining how this is done?

[stoat]

I can understand your reluctance to drag a desktop or a tower out your desk. Both methods (ndiswrapper and the native driver) involve some downloads from the Internet to set up. It is possible to get the files that you need onto the desktop hard drive in other ways. It just won't be as easy as a direct Internet connection (like you found out with your attempt to compile ndiswrapper). If you forgot or don't have something, everything stops until you get it. If you had installed Fedora 8 instead of Fedora 7, more of what you need for the native driver would have been installed by default (a newer kernel, newer b43 driver module, b43-fwcutter). You would have needed only the Broadcom driver file that could be easily transferred to your drive.

The two methods in a nutshell for comparison:

ndiswrapper

Update to the latest F7 kernel
Install ndiswrapper (I use livna's which means installing the livna repo, too)
Install the Windows driver from your Linksys CD using ndiswrapper
Add the ndiswrapper module to the kernel with modprobe
Disable (a.k.a. blacklist) the native Broadcom drivers
Start NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher

b43 (the native driver)

Update to the latest F7 kernel
Install b43-fwcutter
Get the so-called version 4 Broadcom driver (wl_apsta.o) from the Internet (see the references below for where; don't use the one on the CD for this)
Extract the firmware from the driver with b43-fwcutter
Add the b43 module to the kernel with modprobe
Start NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher

Some references for this stuff:

ndiswrapper home page (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.php?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,installation/) (ignore the compiling from source stuff; install it with yum)
Linux Wireless on the the b43 drivers (http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43)
Fedora Unity on the b43 drivers (http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras/)
Fedora Unity on NetworkManager (http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/network-manager)
Fedora Unity on ndiswrapper (http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/ndis-yum-livna)

Some forum threads

A thread that started out with b43 and ended up with ndiswrapper (http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=175111)
Here's a b43 HOWTO that buchalkalan wrote (http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=174620)
There are many more threads on both methods; just search for more.

P.S.: Those nutshell steps apply as written only if your WMP54G has the 4306 chipset like my Linksys cards do. I have seen newer Linksys cards with completely different chipsets.

P.P.S.: I don't use NetworkManager myself and instead manually configure and activate devices and connections with scripts. That is so unpopular nowadays that I didn't mention it in the steps. NetworkManager is the new thing and works nicely for most people. I recommend that you use it. I only mention this issue so that as you read things out there, you will understand that this process sort of "forks" again at the final configuration steps into those who use NetworkManager, those who use the older Network Configuration utility, and the few who use the really older CLI commands and scripts. Don't get derailed by that. Use NetworkManager because it simplifies the setup for most people, handles the various encryption methods, eases the final configuration process.