Hello wratliff
And here's me thinking that I was talking to an adolescent! Actually, for all your seniority in terms of children I can probably give to 10 or more years.
Just a little background then so you know what we are doing in case the college kids ask questions.
There are two ways of controlling wireless cards in Linux, native drivers and ndiswrapper.
The latter, as its name suggests, wraps itself around the windows driver for your card and overcomes the lack of linux drivers that way. Some distributions make it easier than others to set up. As you know, Fedora is very much aimed at Open Source software and tries not to taint it with things that are encumbered by licence or other legal restrictions. ndiswrapper works with lots of cards but is continually being updated to work with different windows drivers so it won't work with just anything.
Some cards/chipsets are so popular that open source drivers are being developed for them. The amount of co-operation given by the manufacturers varies. Intel for example seem to have been very co-operative and there are drivers for their 2200-3945-4965 ranges within Fedora and they work right out of the box.
Broadcom are more difficult and although there is now an open source driver developed independently of the company, the company haven't made the firmware that needs to be loaded into the card freely available. Hence the b43 drivers have made it into the Linux kernel and into Fedora but we still have to get the firmware from a source external to Fedora and integrate it to get the card working.
The b43 driver is relatively new. In Fedora 7 we had its predecessor the bcm43xx driver which I never managed to get to work reliably with my 4318 card and so had to use ndiswrapper. With the advent of the b43 though my card has worked well and easily.
That has come about at the same time as something called NetworkManager has been improved and which now makes connecting to wireless networks almost as easy as in Windows.
The provisos are that the broadcast identity of your access point is not hidden, you must not be using static ip addresses and some people have reported difficulty with WPA2 encryption. Though I believe that latter may not be the case in the most recent versions, which you will now have if you've updated your system.
It should be relatively easy now, below are my standard instructions for setting up a broadcom card.
Download this file and put it into a directory somewhere:
http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/b...0.10.5.tar.bz2
Acquire full root rights over your machine with this command in a terminal window:
That's a space and a minus sign after the su. It gives you full root rights over your machine rather than just root rights over your ordinary users environment without it.
Use the cd command to navigate into the directory where you downloaded the above file. Issue the command:
Code:
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
That unpacks the file archive you downloaded and will create you a new directory where you are working called 'broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5'.
cd into that and then the 'driver' directory within that and use the command:
Code:
b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
That cuts the required firmware for your card from the downloaded file and places it in the correct place for the b43 driver to find it.
Check and see if you have NetworkManager showing on the top Gnome Panel to the right in the notification area. If you have ignore the next part.
Go to the "Gnome System Menu - Administration - Services", tick NetworkManager and NetworkMangerDispatcher, make sure they are started and the settings are saved so they start at next boot.
Restart the machine and left clicking on the NetworkManager icon should bring up a list of wireless access points to connect to.
If it doesn't work there are a couple of possible things we may need to alter, mine worked without them though so we'll not complicate things if we don't need to.
I'll be looking for any questions you may have.
Broadcom Blues
Linear Mode
