Fedora core 2 isn't seeing the internal Wireless card or the touchpad...

[John Collier]

I have finally convinced a friend to install Linux on his laptop so that he can see how truly superior it is to M$ products. Now I have the laptop and it has a brand new install of FC2 on it and is all up to date (YUM is GREAT!).

Now I have two immediate problems:

The Wireless adapter isn't listed in the 'ifconfig' and I have never had to configure one of them to work on a laptop before. I could really use some help getting that hammered out.

The touchpad is also completely non-functional. He has a wireless USB mouse, but he has also gotten quite used to using the touchpad and will probably not be too happy with this...


The laptop in question is a HP Pavilion ze4400. As far as I can tell, there are no modifications that have been made to it beyond original specs. I know that it has an AMD XP-M processor and 512 MG of RAM at this point. Unfortunately, I don't know the chipset of the internal wireless card.

I am probably overlooking some pretty basic stuff, but have you ever tried to search the 'Net for “Fedora Core 2 Wireless and touchpad”? The results can be overwhelming...

Please help my get this to work so that I can break another soul away from the clutches of the Evil Ones in Redmond, WA...


Thanks,

[Steven E. Protter]

EEek John,

The least you could have done is pick a laptop that is Penguin certified.

There is a known problem with Fedora Core 2 supporting certain AMD processors. This may be corrected in Fedora Core 3, but I would not put beta software on my laptop.

What amazes me is that you are not complaining about the video on that laptop. There have been countless problems with this HP series Z laptop and and video drivers. Doees it have a modem? Does the modem work? If not check out http://www.linmodems.org

If HP doesn't have drivers for the touchpad you are getting a ps/2 or usb mouse to deal with that problem.

Finding out the chipset on the wireless card will lead you the the manufacturers website and possibly get you a driver though the process may be painful.

I suspect however that the hardware issue is caused by the processor support issue and if you get that straigtened out with Red Hat WS or Suse or FC 3 when it goes gold, the other issues will workthemselves out.

I know, its not even close to a solution, but there may not be an easier one.

SEP

[Stuart Browne]

'lspci' is your friend, it will at least help you track down the manufacturer of the wireless card.

I've read a number of posts stating that getting the syanptics touchpad to work isn't too hard, just may require a kernel recompile. Here's one post with regards to specific functionality with one, but not specically for your laptop model: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2343

Or : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?threadid=123298

Couldn't find anything with regards to wireless.. (note, you might want to try searches on 'FC2'..)

[Jerome Henry]

Hi John,

Touchpad is an easy issue, here is the way how, it's about IBM thinkpad, but HP uses synaptics on Pavilion too if I remember well. No need to compile anymore, just a driver to install thru rpm or tgz and /etc/X11/xorg.conf to modify :
http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~phurd/thinkpad-r40-fc2.html
I don't know what wireless nic ze4400 has, lspci will tell, and mostly a driver download should allow neat to detect the new hardware...

hth

J

[Steven E. Protter]

Completely Off topic note:

Jerome is 15 points from the status of Linux King.

Maybe someone could help him out?

;-)

I might have been wrong on that AMD issue. There are serious hardware problems with this line of laptops, but maybe not the processor.

SEP

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi,

you could check:

http://www.cybersym.com/pages/linux-ze4100.html

Regards,

Gideon

[Bruce Copeland]

Gideon:

I'm afraid that last link (actually my site) won't help John much because it's seriously out of date.

However, it turns out I've spent the last couple of days updating my ze4100 to FC2. The touchpad/wireless problems bit me too, but I have pretty much gotten them resolved.

The ze4100 doesn't have an internal wireless card, but I DO use a Netgear MA401RA (prism 2.5) pcmcia card, and I have (just in the last hour) managed to get it working using the hostap driver packages from ATRpms. If the internal wireless card on the ze4400 is a prism, John, I can try to walk you through the hostap installation/configuration.

Bruce

[John Collier]

OK,

First of all I want to thank the two that pointed me to the 'lspci' command. It was just what the Dr. ordered and I now have the info for the wireless card.

The card I am dealing with is listed through that command as '00:09.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94306 802.11g (rev 02)'

Now I just have to find the correct drivers for it (hopefully in RPM format) and learn how to enable it both at boot and manually if need be.

If any of you are willing to point me to the correct RPM or the correct RPM site, I would be grateful. If not, I am sure I will eventually find it on my own...


BTW, it would seem that the issue with the touchpad was a non-issue after all. I did all of that reading on all of the sites you guys were so nice to provide just to find out that all I had to do was to boot without the USB device in place.

I might be slow, but I'm learning...

[Jerome Henry]

Hi John !
lol for the touchpad ! You're still lucky that it's natively supported. I had to do the synaptics install every time I crashed my tests laptop (and believe me, I'm able to crash it almost once a week on experimenting !).
As for broadcom, here's a link describing the process :
welcome to no_cable world !

Jerome

[John Collier]

Jerome,

Thanks for not making too big of a deal out of my oversight on the touchpad. Believe me, I felt pretty silly when I figured out I had done it to myself and did all that reading for no good reason other than simple learning...

Oh well.

As far as the link you offered, it doesn't look as if it went through. Mind trying that one again, please?


BTW -- I am refraining from assigning the bunny on this one for the time being. I don't want to get people thinking that there is no reason to contribute to it if they have a decent idea, but it WILL be assigned eventually.

[Jerome Henry · Accepted solution]

Oops, strange indeed, here it is :
http://bnmr.triumf.ca/~zaher/Presario_2197CA/
Once again, it's not your computer, but your NIC on Linux.
I had the same kind of "oh no !" issue yesterday, wondering why I couldn't access the network from one office I just got in... tested DNS, pinged, walked to router, switch, no alarm... I finally sat back at my laptop and put my foot on... the rj45 heab, waiting to be plugged... GGhhhh !

J

[John Collier]

My thanks go out to both Stuart and Jerome on the final solution to this issue. The combination of the 'lspci' and the link to the page containing all the information on the 'ndiswrapper' provided all of the tools to complete this task.

As a final note on this chapter of my first laptop load of FC2, I have since returned the laptop to it's rightful owner and he seemed quite impressed with the speed and features of the system/OS combination. The fact that the entire software suite was completely free of charge is a concept he is still trying to wrap his mind around, but I feel with time he will get there :-)

The only thing that may compel him to switch it back to M$ would be the lack of software available to play his DVD movies while he is away from home, but we are looking at alternatives for this situation at this time. Perhaps I will locate something for him on this current OS, perhaps not.

But that is an issue for another thread.

Thanks to all who contributed their time and ideas to this issue. Without the free-flow of ideas, this issue may not have been so easily resolved.

You guys & gals are GREAT!


Regards,
John