I have been banging my head against the wall for days trying to get my laptop’s wireless card working in Fedora 7. I have it working correctly now but it probably took me 12 hours or more over the course of a week to straighten it out. As an RHCE I took it as a personal challenge to get it working.
In defense of Fedora and Linux in general, I have had other cards automatically recognized and work “out of the box.” Plus, this particular card (Broadcom 4318 aka Airforce One 54g) seems to be particularly difficult based on the amount of complaints I found in my research. Add to that the fact Broadcom doesn’t want to work with the open-source community. But, this kind of blackhole for time is what scares off new users from desktop Linux.
I intend to write a how-to soon with detailed info on what it took to get everything up and running. But in the meantime, here are some pointers:
1) Don’t use the included bcm driver, load ndiswrapper and use the Windows driver files as detailed in the instructions.
2) If you are using WPA/WPA2 security as I am, don’t mess with wpa_supplicant directly, let NetworkManager handle it.
Speaking of NetworkManager, if it isn’t loaded (by default in the upper panel near the switch user applet and clock) install it now.
3) Here is the big kicker that got me: if you are using WPA/WPA2 you can’t have SSID broadcasting turned off at your router/AP. Even if you can see it in NM after choosing to “Connect to Other Wireless Network” it won’t work, trust me.
When I have some more time, I will write a more detailed how-to with links to the driver I used etc. Hopefully this can point you in the right direction until then.
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Thank you! I had wireless working in FC6, but after upgrading to 7 was unable to get it going. Your “step 3″ turned out to be the answer.
I got wpa-psk to work without turning on ssid broadcasting on my router. It seems that my default the wpa supplicant is configured for a ssid id of “anyâ€, which is probably why we had to have broadcasting enabled. Okay so use your favorite editor and configure wpa supplicant as such:
*************************
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
network={
ssid=â€MYNetworkâ€
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
}
****************************
Set the ssid to the ssid of your network and configure your key management to TKIP, or AES. pairwise, and group should be of the same type. .. Either TKIP or AES
Save the file, then go back to network manager and try to connect to your AP!