broadcom-wl, touchpad click, and a few other niggles

[MHGTX]

Why Fedora

I'm migrating to Fedora 17 64bit KDE Spin from ArchLinux, because my current OS is not so developer friendly and does not have the content I need in its official/unofficial binary repositories.

Hardware

An Acer eMachines e725 laptop with 5GB DDR3 RAM and an Intel T4400 Pentium Dual Core and my graphics chip is an onboard Intel GMA 4500 MHD.

Road so far:

Installed unetbootin, downloaded the ISO, used an old 2GB Transcend USB Drive to boot into fedora 17 KDE x64 live environment and landed up at the desktop. Have a few niggles I need help with so that I can do my installation.

Niggles

1. Need broadcom-wl driver installed. This is the *only* driver that works for my wifi chip, b43 does not work. How do I get it in the live environment ? I cannot install any packages without WiFi. Currently using my Desktop's ethernet cable to browse this forum.

2. Touchpad cannot click. Had to connect a mouse for some level of comfort. Appreciate tips to fix this. System Settings > input devices > touchpad says tapping is enabled. Whether disabled or enabled, cannot click with touchpad. Suggest a fix.

3. By default LCD Backlight is off. Screen goes blank at startup after choosing boot options. This seems to be an error in newer linux kernels in the way they set the screen brightness (atleast since 3.0 was released). Fixed by adding "acpi_osi= " as parameter to the kernel and then manually increasing screen brightness via the special keys on my keyboard during boot. Need to know if I can change the grub menu entry during installation itself so that I can avoid the hassle later.

4. KDE Text Input sucks. Pressing down key and holding it does not automatically go to the end of typed text, it goes to the last line at the same column and stays there. Any fix would be welcome.

5. Fonts are ugly. Any way to beautify the fonts ? My eyes hurt.


PS: New to fedora and to fedora forums. Used RHEL6 and CentOS6 a few times at work but experience ends there. So please provide noob friendly advice. Oh and don't mind excess use of smilies

[ozjd]

2. When I used to use KDE I found I needed to experiment with Sensitivity settings before Touch to Click would work.
4. Doesn't the End key do what yo want here?
5. KDE settings has a place for changing fonts, anti-aliasing and font size etc. but don't know if that is what you need.

[MHGTX]

Originally Posted by ozjd

2. When I used to use KDE I found I needed to experiment with Sensitivity settings before Touch to Click would work.
4. Doesn't the End key do what yo want here?
5. KDE settings has a place for changing fonts, anti-aliasing and font size etc. but don't know if that is what you need.

2. Will check.

4. Yeah it does, but with GTK apps text input, pressing and holding down automatically acts like the end key. I'm sort of used to that feature. (With Arch I used a KDE desktop but many of my primary typing apps were non-kde - LibreOffice, Firefox, Geany, etc).

5. Nevermind, figured it out myself.

BTW any solution for the WiFi driver thing ?

[ozjd]

Originally Posted by MHGTX

BTW any solution for the WiFi driver thing ?

A search of the forums brought up this - http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=280821

[MHGTX]

Originally Posted by ozjd

A search of the forums brought up this - http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=280821

akmod-wl is the solution it seems.

But I need wifi during installation since I cannot always access the etherenet cable (which is attached to the desktop which inturn is being used by someone else).

after installing akmod-wl how can I get the drivers to work without rebooting ?

[ozjd]

Originally Posted by MHGTX

akmod-wl is the solution it seems.

But I need wifi during installation since I cannot always access the etherenet cable (which is attached to the desktop which inturn is being used by someone else).

after installing akmod-wl how can I get the drivers to work without rebooting ?

Looks like akmod-wl is broken at the moment. You need to build the file yourself. If you follow the seventh post in that thread it should be working without a reboot.

[MHGTX]

Originally Posted by ozjd

Looks like akmod-wl is broken at the moment. You need to build the file yourself. If you follow the seventh post in that thread it should be working without a reboot.

Thanks a lot.

BTW, how easy is it to install Fedora to a USB HDD, see if everything works properly, and when I'm completely sure replace my arch install on the laptop's HDD ? I would only need to modify the FSTAB right ?

[ozjd]

Never done it so I can't comment. Maybe you should start a new thread on that.