Configuring wireless networking on Fedora 9
I have always struggled to get wireless to work under my favorite Linux distro, Fedora. I recently switched to Ubuntu just because wireless networking pretty much works out of the box. The only work required is enabling the restricted device driver.
Since the release of the partially open source Broadcom wireless drivers I have been debating trying to get the wireless NIC in my Dell Latitude D620 to work under Fedora 9, (the current release at this time).
After doing a quick Google search, I came across this blog.
I still ran into some minor issues, but was finally able to get wireless to work successfully. It turns out that from a default installation of Fedora, you need to install the kernel development package to get the driver package to make. The only modification I made was adding the “kernel-devel” package to the yum install in step one. One other note… The current driver does not seem to like wireless networks with their SSID broadcasts turned off. Not a big deal considering that SSID broadcasting is usually turned on and I am sure the driver will be fixed with a future release.
It also seems that there is an RPM available to make the install even easier. Here is the excerpt from the blog:
“Update 8 November 2008: Just a note to mention that I’ve packaged this up into an RPM and so this driver will shortly be available as an RPM in the rpmfusion repos for Fedora 8, 9 and 10.
It is already in “rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing” for Fedora 8 and 9 releases. If you have that repo enabled just do a “yum install wl-kmod” to install this driver.”
Thank you cenolan.com! You have certainly done your part in helping solve this headache!
