How to activate wlan on fedora 9

What wireless hardware is in your laptop? If you type this command in a terminal, and look for the item that mentions wireless.

 

lspci -v | less

 

You could also try booting from an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD and see if it recognises your wireless hardware, so you can then use that information to help track down the correct driver.

 

Cod

Looks like a Broadcomm Card, which is the usual manufactorer of the "Dell" branded wireless cards

 

have you started NetworkManager?  In Fedora9 it works fairly well -- open a terminal and as root type:

 

service NetworkManager start

 

An icon will appear in your sys tray (top right in Gnome) LMB for ESSIDs your card detects.

 

Thanks Cod and Philly.

 

As Philly says, is a broadcom, 

 

Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1350 WLAN Mini-PCI Card
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 19
Memory at dfdfe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: ssb

 

I  followed instructions on http://fedorasolved.org/mobile/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras , also started NetworkManager and now the error is:

 

b43-phy1: Broadcom 4306 WLAN found
b43-phy1 debug: Found PHY: Analog 2, Type 2, Revision 2
b43-phy1 debug: Found Radio: Manuf 0x17F, Version 0x2050, Revision 2
input: b43-phy1 as /devices/virtual/input/input12
b43-phy1: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10)
b43-phy1 debug: Chip initialized
b43-phy1 debug: 30-bit DMA initialized
Registered led device: b43-phy1::tx
Registered led device: b43-phy1::rx
Registered led device: b43-phy1::radio
b43-phy1 ERROR: PHY transmission error
b43-phy1 debug: Wireless interface started
b43-phy1 debug: Adding Interface type 2
b43-phy1 ERROR: PHY transmission error

 

I don't know what else to do.

I would now do too things, I would attempt bootiing with an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD to see if it can see youtr card, so we can see what modules get loaded. Different distros include different drivers and kernel backports.

 

You can also use something called ndiswrapper which allows you to use windows card drivers in Linux. This is supported in Fedora and should be downloadable from the standard repositories.

 

Take a look here

 

ndiswrapper

 

Cod

Try downloading and updating the firmware from BCM as well ... I had a buddy who had similar issues and I threw together a page for him to follow:  http://www.linuxweather.com/kim_wifi_fix.html this is what I did to get his to work on the XPSM1530

 

1.  yum install make gcc kernel-headers

2  wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
3  tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2

4. cd b43-fwcutter-011

5. make

6.  cd ..

7.  export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"

8.  wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

9.  tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

10.  cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver

11. sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" wl_apsta_mimo.o

Hi Philly and thank for your help. Let me tell you that i've already done everything. I also proved with a live kubuntu 8.04 and didn't work. I installed from blank Kubuntu 8.04 and there's no change. Doesn't work either.

 

It's driving me crazy. Don't know what else to do ....

Make sure to blacklist the default driver ... but yeah, I haven't heard good reports of the BCM wifi cards .. I would tend to suggest the Intel series cards which have much more support, whereas if a simple ethernet NIC either Broadcomm or Intel are comparable.

Hello there Phill, one thing i've noticed is all guides regarding activating wlan on linux for BCM talks about Hardware and it's revision. For my BCM card revision is 3, but in every single forum and even in openwrt the firmware is based on BCM43XX revision 2. So perhaps the problem is just that. I don't know. But anyway thanks for your help.