Fedora 13 Live USB boots fine, but no network

[hmerrill]

I just bought an F13 Live USB - it boots fine into F13, but there's no network and I don't know where to go or what to do to get it to work. I can't find any network gui, and I can't find any docs on using network manager command line commands. This machine is a Toshiba Satellite and it has a Realtek RTL8191SE wireless card - the problem could be that F13 doesn't have the driver for that card, but how do I figure that out? And if that is the problem, how do I fix it, and how do I update or remaster the F13 Live USB to include that driver?

Thanks for any help or info.

[stoat]

Originally Posted by hmerrill

...the problem could be that F13 doesn't have the driver for that card, but how do I figure that out?

I think you just did.

When I searched for that particular chipset here and at ubuntuforums, I found examples and anecdotes where it worked with various methods such as ndiswrapper and a Windows driver, and a driver compiled from source available from Realtek, and even one sort of rumor that it works with the r8192se module in staging (available as a kmod from RPM Fusion). None of those will be easy to get going in a live system, but they might be worth trying if you ever install to the hard drive. No promises, of course.

[kurtdriver]

I'm using a rtl8192se right now, with the driver from realtek. You'll need gcc and kernel-headers and the kernel-headers must match your kernel. First download the driver, then do this,

yum install gcc kernel-headers kernel-devel; yum update kernel

and then cd into the directory the driver is in. and extract it from the tarball

tar -xzvf rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0507.2010.tar.gz

cd into the new directory

cd rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0507.2010

and follow the instructions in the file README, which are

make; su -c "make install"

Next copy the directory to some where safe, /usr/local or /root/, perhaps, and you may as well rm the tarball, you shouldn't need it again. I've always rebooted to load the module into the kernel, but you can do it on the fly, with modprobe I believe. Maybe I'll go that route next time. With this method, I have to repeat the make install step with each kernel update.