Natural Blogarithms

I finally finished getting my laptop setup to dual boot with Fedora Core Linux and Windows XP.

I had a few major issues but was finally able to find the correct solution to my problem.

Problems:

1. After setting up separate partition with Partition Magic and then install Fedora Core 8, the Windows system would not boot saying “autochk autocheck not found” and going straight to the dreaded blue screen of death. I discovered that Partition Magic (or the Fedora install) marked the NTFS partition as hidden. I had to use a utility called BootIT NG, creating a bootable CD and using this utility (without installing to) to switch from a hidden NTFS partition to not hidden.
Problem 1 Solved.

2. This one took a lot longer. I have Dell Latitude D420 with a Broadcom 1390 WLAN MiniCard. These drivers were never offered for Linux so the necessary drivers had to be reverse engineered (not by me, of course, but they are out there). There are apparently two options which as a Linux-noob, I couldn’t tell more than that. I tried a number of forums and went step by step through the provided procedure. I did at least 3 fresh installs of the entire operating system, after I felt I had mucked up the system beyond fixing. Finally, the one the worked was here:

http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras

I’m going to quote most of it here for future reference, but I give them full credit for something that works. And definitely use the NetworkManager hint below. I used the b43 drivers below and everything worked.

Doing the Work

1. Open a terminal .
2. Install the bcm43xx-fwcutter and b43-fwcutter packages:

su -c 'yum install bcm43xx-fwcutter b43-fwcutter'

3. Download the correct firmware for your device from here or select the correct firmware from the following links:For b43, download and untar Version 4 firmware:

   • http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
     

   For b43legacy and bcm43xx, download Version 3 firmware:

   • http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
4. Extract the firmware:For b43:

   su -c 'b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/kmod/wl_apsta.o'

   For b43legacy:

   su - c 'b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o'

   For bcm43xx:

   su -c 'bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o'

5. Optional: Enable NetworkManager for managing this device (very recommended!)
6. Alias the correct module to your wlan0 device:For b43:
   

   echo "alias wlan0 b43" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

   For b43legacy:

   echo "alias wlan0 b43legacy" >> /etc/modprobe.conf

7. Now, reload the driver:For b43:

   su -l -c 'rmmod b43 && modprobe b43'

   For b43legacy:

   su -l -c 'rmmod b43legacy && modprobe b43legacy'

8. If the reload fails, just reboot.

Problem 2 Solved: WOOOHOOOO!!!!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS