Wireless problem with Fedora 6 Linux

[fireman00]

I was given an IBM T20, 700 Mhz processor with 256 Mb of RAM and a 11 Gig hard drive. Windows is out of the question.

I installed Puppy Linux 2.11 with some good results but I couldn't get the GRUB to install properly and while I could get my Linksys WPC11 v4 wireless card to work, I would have to reload the drivers 'cuz I had to boot up off the CD - thanks to the GRUB issue.

I read about Fedora 6 (free Red Hat Linux) and gave it a go. The install went very smoothly, while it runs a little slower then Puppy this GRUB is functioning properly. Open Office 2.0 will meet my needs and Firefox 2.0 is running great.

My only concern is that while I can connect via cable to my DSL router I cannot get the wireless card to be recognized - which kind of kills the premise of having a laptop. I've downloaded 'ndiswrapper kernel' and 'ndiswrapper' (both in RPM format) and the install seemed to go alright. I was able to install and load the Windows XP drivers, but the system isn't seeing the card when I try to activate it.

Any suggestions?

 

[Carol]

Try a search on linuxforums.org There are a few LINUX gurus on there that may be able to help.

 

[Andrew Green]

First see if your card is supported on LInux:

http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz

After that I got no idea

Fedora might not be the best bet if you are new to Linux though, Might be better with Ubuntu, Suse, or Mandriva as easier to get into distrobutions. Ubuntu is probably the leading one, Kubuntu if you prefer KDE, and it is very easy to get most things set up.

But wireless is a iffy thing as not all cards are supported. You might just need to get a different card (Check the list first )

 

[bignick]

Try using the drivers for Windows 2000 with ndiswrappers. That has done the trick with me before. Also, probably one of the bigger contributors to your performance is going to be your window manager. Instead of KDE or Gnome, which I believe is still the Red Hat default you could give a lighter WM a try. Check out fluxbox, IceWM, or XFCE. They still look pretty nice as well. I haven't used Fedora since FC3, (moved on to Kubuntu and VectorLinux), but I'm sure that if they are not installed already doing a yum --install should probably pull them down

 

[OUMoose]

I've heard from a couple various sources that Fedora Core 6 is quite buggy and unstable. If you're bent on having Red Hat, try Core 5 with all the updates to see how it runs.

If that doesn't help, try Ubuntu. It's seems to be the big player on the block right now, and for all intents and purposes is pretty nice!

Also, if a heavy duty GUI isn't really required, give OpenBSD a try. They put extra work into networking/wireless drivers which are coded specifically for the OS, and it's much more secure out of the box than pretty much every distro on the market (good if you're going to be using alot of hotspots).

just my 2cents.