Dell Mini9 wifi card not recognized

[adriano]

Hi,

just tried installing the latest FC10 beta on a dell mini9. Everything went smoothly all hardware recognized (including bluetooth), but the wifi card.

Anyone knows where to find a driver suitable for the mini9's internal wifi card?

Thanks,

- Adriano

[stoat]

Hello adriano,

A good first step is to identify the card's chipset. Open a terminal and run.../sbin/lspci | grep Network

[adriano]

Hi,

thanks for your reply! Here you go:

/$ lspci | grep Network
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)

(what above is off ubuntu 8.10 which I have now installed on the mini9, since that recognizes the wifi card -- if you need I can run the same command off the latest fedora 10 beta as well -- got a life usb stick with it on -- I'd rather use fedora)

- Adriano

[stoat]

/$ lspci | grep Network
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)It's a commonly discussed card. Here are some threads with details leading to a successful outcome using...

The b43 native Linux driver (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=193555)
Dangermouse's autonine script (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=188339)

If you get bogged down with either of those, return here to report what you tried and what is wrong. Help will come from every direction.

[adriano]

Hi,

thanks for the tips -- tried the instructions at the first link, no errors but after the reboot the card was still not recognized.

Second link refers to a script whose page is not existent anymore apparently.

- Adriano

[stoat]

If you still want to try it, here is a working link to Dangermouse's Autonine script (http://dnmouse.org/autoinstall.html) (copied from Dangermouse's signature in a recent post).

[adriano]

thanks -- tried that but unfortunately requires internet connection, and fedora 10 (got the very latest 10 beta) doesn't see the wired network connection on the mini9 either :( or -- it does see it, but then it will never obtain an ip, and setting it manually won't still get any packet flowing.

Got the rpm the dangermouse script points to (b43-2-1.noarch.rpm), installed, but that didn't seem to help.

Spotted an article pretty on topic with the model of wifi card my mini9 has (http://my.opera.com/e-mak/blog/configuring-a-builtin-broadcom-4312-wireless-card-on-hp-pavilion-dv6059ea), tried that too, no luck either.

Wish to have more time to mess around with this... but I'll probably end up sticking with ubuntu till hopefully the final fedora 10 will support the mini9 network adapters.

Too bad cause I love fedora have it everywhere but on the mini9. Sigh.

- Adriano

[stoat]

Spotted an article pretty on topic with the model of wifi card my mini9 has (http://my.opera.com/e-mak/blog/confi...ilion-dv6059ea), tried that too, no luck either.

Wish to have more time to mess around with this... but I'll probably end up sticking with ubuntu till hopefully the final fedora 10 will support the mini9 network adapters.

Too bad cause I love fedora have it everywhere but on the mini9. Sigh.Yes, that is too bad. I like Fedora, too. Anyway, some final comments.

That article you mentioned is basically good conceptually, but it's a little old now. For example, it's not strictly necessary to create a b43 alias for wlan0 when using NetworkManager (and probably most people do use it nowadays). It probably doesn't harm anything to create the alias, and it used to be required for the module to load and for the card to appear in the Network Configuration utility. But NetworkManager has mostly made that stuff unnecessary now.

It's also not necessary to blacklist bcm43xx because it doesn't come with Fedora kernels anymore. It was replaced by b43 back with Fedora 7. For a very short time, they both existed together. But those days are long gone.

Next, I've found that when you are going to manage the connection with NetworkManager, you can omit fooling around with the Network Configuration utility (system-config-network). I connect with NM and have no wireless connection at all created in the Network Configuration utility.

Next, in Services (system-config-services) there is no longer a NetworkManagerDispatcher service. I don't know what happened to it. But starting with F8, it's not there anymore.

Lastly, that version of the Broadcom driver (broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2) has been updated. I'm still using it with Fedora 8. But I have read where the b43 driver with newer kernels have stopped (or soon will stop) working with that older version.

I'm not trying to talk you out of staying with Ubuntu. My only point is that things change; and pretty fast with Fedora. So things that you read on the Internet can become inaccurate pretty fast, too. And I guess you had a good reason to install a pre-release version of Fedora which is kinda asking for torture. Anyway, good luck next time you try wireless with Fedora.

[adriano]

My only point is that things change; and pretty fast with Fedora. So things that you read on the Internet can become inaccurate pretty fast, too. And I guess you had a good reason to install a pre-release version of Fedora which is kinda asking for torture. Anyway, good luck next time you try wireless with Fedora.

I agree, which is why I hope to get back on Fedora soon. And reason why I went for 10, is that 9 on the mini most of the times doesn't complete booting up (gets stuck when detecting the ssdisk) and when it does, right after the boot brings up the message saying "the system just experienced a kernel failure". Oh and no network connection detected.

- Adriano