Not able to see my wireless card

[dodaniel]

Hello guys, I am completely new to the world of Linux.

I have been meddling around for the past week with different distros trying to decide what I like and dont like. And I have pretty much settled on Fedora...

I am trying to get my wireless NIC working on my old Dell 5150 laptop. It has a broadcom unit in it, and after installed Fedora Core 7, I only see eth0, my wired connection, and no mention of my wireless.

I went to the terminal, and attempted to run lspci, but I keep getting: bash: lspci: command not found
however when I run: man lspci it brings up the man file.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[Brian1]

For lspci run it like this as a user.
/sbin/lspci
Reason is /sbin it not part of a users default path.

More than likely you will need to use ndiswrapper and windows inf driver. Several thousand post of this subject on how to install ndiswrapper with yum. The easiest for the beginner. Other option compile it yourself but you need to install kernel-devel-****.rpm before compiling ndiswrapper. You can research kernel-devel rpm install here as well. Yum is the easiest after the repository is created for the location of the ndiswrapper and ndiswrapper-kmod rpms. Again post related can be found using the search tool.

Brian

[dodaniel]

Originally Posted by Brian1

For lspci run it like this as a user.
/sbin/lspci
Reason is /sbin it not part of a users default path.

More than likely you will need to use ndiswrapper and windows inf driver. Several thousand post of this subject on how to install ndiswrapper with yum. The easiest for the beginner. Other option compile it yourself but you need to install kernel-devel-****.rpm before compiling ndiswrapper. You can research kernel-devel rpm install here as well. Yum is the easiest after the repository is created for the location of the ndiswrapper and ndiswrapper-kmod rpms. Again post related can be found using the search tool.

Brian

Thanks for the help. I was able to run lspci and see the NIC. Now to tackle the ndiswrapper issue, again, I am fairly clueless to how Linux does things. Ill hit you guys up for more help if/when I need it.

Thanks!

[s0ulburn26]

I will tell you good luck, I have myself spent the last week and a half trying to get it just installed. I finally got the kernel source in and devel stuff in and get the ndiswrapper installed. If your laptop like my Dell Latitude 120L has a Broadcom card in it theres b43 in a module I keep reading about that you are supposed to black list. I have also black listed this 'b43' and on reboot b43 still shows up and still wants to run my wireless card. I went to the dell website downloaded the driver for my wireless card unziped the files and put the inf and sys file in /sbin with no luck when I run the command ndiswrapper -l i get that the driver is invalid. And here I thought I had gotten something accomplished today I really hope that We can get enough feed back to Fedora that they can get this b43 out of the next kernel fix or Fedora 8 works with the Broadcom cards. Seems like this is a common problem with the card. I have read too much information about people getting theres to run and am starting to wonder what I have done wrong and am trying to retrace my steps to figure out what I can do to get this working.