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Installing Linux is not always easy, specially on laptops. Most of the time is because of the hardware they have, like what I’m facing right now, my wireless card was not working out of the box (I wasn’t expecting it to), the 3D acceleration is not working and probably won’t be working for quite some time, the memory card reader is not working at all. I was finally able to install Linux and Windows on the laptop, I got the wireless card working as well. I wish I could say the same for the video card, but apparently the problem that I have is because of the memory it has.

Ok, so after searching and testing and planning I finally installed Linux on my laptop. The distro that was installed: Fedora Core 5, some people don’t agree with me, but the choice was made because I was told that Fedora had good support for the Broadcom 4318 wireless card.

So installation was smooth and didn’t have problems at all. Once installed I began tryin to get the wireless card to work, that’s the first thing on my list of priorities. I attemted to use the Linux drivers for the card and after trying once and again I was unable to get the card to actually work, the card was seen by the system and was able to “activate” it but I was unable to connect to the AP, even with all security turned off on the AP, I was still unable to connect.

So my next step was to undo all the previous steps, the ones I did to try to get the card working, and use ndiswrapper. So I was able to install the drivers, the card was being seen by the system, now came the moment where I attemted to connect to the AP and to the Internet using nothing more than the wireless card, so I activate the card, put in the security information and nothing, NOTHING!!! the card was unable to connect and obtain an IP address from the DHCP server, so at this point I wonder if I was so unlucky that the card would never work under Linux, just like the ATI video card that the laptop has. So I kept at it, trying to get it to work, I later found out that if I give the card an SSID of it’s own it will work, so now I got the laptop connected to the AP at home.

I did install the network applet for gnome, which is great. Here’s the instructions that I ran to install the applet:

su -c ‘/sbin/chkconfig –level 345 NetworkManager on’
su -c ‘/sbin/chkconfig –level 345 NetworkManagerDispatcher on’
su -c ‘/sbin/service NetworkManager start ; /sbin/service NetworkManagerDispatcher start

Now I’m no expert at this, so I don’t really know if that is what makes the applet run on gnome at startup, but that’s what made the applet appear.

I used the instructions that appear on: http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=115572&highlight=bcm4318

So, the things that are not working:

- The memory card reader

- 3D acceleration on the ATI Xpress 200M

For the time being, the memory card reader is not a big problem, since I don’t use it much. The video card problem is a disappointment, but I’ll live, I can watch videos with the radeon drivers that xorg uses, so not much of a problem there.

Also, Fedora Core 5 will stay on the laptop for a while, until I can get the time to sit down and install ArchLinux on it. I still have to update the “My Hardware” page to reflect the new hardware I have, so check back.

-LM