Yesterday after a lot of trials with Fedora Core 5 to activate my wireless LAN card, I switched to Fedora Core 4, which looked much more stable than FC5. Actually with FC5, I mainly faced problems with gui , my mouse which is Microsoft USB mouse and my wlan card which is level one Ralink RT2500. In FC5, I tried both with ndiswrapper and madwifi but nothing worked out for me. Also my mouse was not working well. I can click things but the pointer was not visible like microsoft gave me a invisible mouse or this microsoft mouse don’t want to work with Linux. After installing FC4, I felt very comfortable with guis and my mouse. They worked fine. But now there were two problems. One is that FC4 was not able to detect my soundcard and the wlan was not working again. Anyway soundcard is not a big problem, as it worked in FC5, I’ll make it work with some up-gradation or things like that. But the major problem is wlan. And here goes the methods which I tried to activate my wlan card.
Method 1. With rpms
I downloaded these rpms
1 2 3 | madwifi-0.9.4.12-16.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm madwifi-kmdl-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-0.9.4.12-16.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm madwifi-hal-kmdl-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4smp-0.9.6.0-20.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm |
from the site atrpms and tried installing them but they failed the dependency /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4 , then i tried to find this rpm everywhere on google , rpmfind etc …. but I could not find it. Then I installed it with –nodeps option and configured according to the data given here .
But in vain.
Method 2. With ndiswrapper using Microsoft Windows XP drivers
I downloaded the ndiswrapper-1.16 from sourceforge.
I untarred it and used these commands.
1 2 3 | make uninstall make make install |
Please don’t forget to the read the INSTALL and README files in the ndiswrapper-1.* directory. Then I inserted my LAN card driver cd for XP and copied the drivers directory which contains .inf and .sys files to my root directory. Then I used the commands .
1 2 3 4 5 | ndiswrapper -i Rt2500.INF ndiswrapper -l modprobe ndiswrapper iwconfig "wlan0" key open "wep 128 bit hex key" ESSID "IIIT WLAN" dhclient wlan0 |
I ran all this command and I am very happy to say that wireless LAN did not work. 🙂 Then I ran this command
touch /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 |
and then edited this file. I entered all the data suggested here except that second line I wrote
DEVICE=wlan0 |
OK. Then i ran
neat |
and edited the properties of wlan device by double clicking it and gave the 26 letters wlan key there and activated the device and it worked 😀
use ubuntu man..it rox as far as hardware is concerned..
y dont come back to FC5 ..though not that stable ..but has more utitlites
btw…that /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4 is ur kernel image 😛
You (atleast you :P) are supposed to know that u need to install those
rpms according to the version of the kernel you are using….got me ??
Yeah, FC5 has more utilities … not to forget the mono platform and beagle indexing and search engine. Try installing beagle on your FC4, its really nice.
And did sound work??
@Anurag not yet ….
@D00d original FC4 kernel is too old that its very hard to find the xact packages for that …..