Saturday, January 30, 2010

Fedora with HP Pavilion - wireless not working

UPDATE (April 4, 2010) - It's working perfectly with Fedora 12

My wife has an HP Pavilion dv1000 laptop which has started to run very slow using windows xp. She still needs windows to connect remotely to her work, but otherwise she just needs internet, and word processing.

I first tried Ubuntu. I got everything working except the wireless.

I followed all the steps outlined here...

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

It appears that the firmware was updated correctly, and the drivers are installed. The problem seems to be with connecting to a router. I am not able to connect to mine, or any other router/wireless network.

Afterwards, I installed Fedora 11 instead. Once again, everything (including direct ethernet) is working except the wireless. The firmware and drivers appear to be correct.

Here are some details about the system...

[root@ruby ruby]# sudo iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wmaster0 no wireless extensions.

wlan1 IEEE 802.11bg Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz
Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

 [root@ruby ruby]# sudo ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16:36:22:75:57
inet addr:192.168.3.101 Bcast:192.168.3.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::216:36ff:fe22:7557/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:580 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:532 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:261810 (255.6 KiB) TX bytes:107320 (104.8 KiB)
Interrupt:16 Base address:0x2000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:34 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:34 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2388 (2.3 KiB) TX bytes:2388 (2.3 KiB)
Posted by at 9:10 AM

48 comments:

  1. Putting Linux on a wifi computer can be a lot of work... depending on your wifi manufacturer. Judging from the fact that you're trying to use a bcm driver... I'm assuming you're using a broadcom card. I went through the same problem a few months back. Are you having trouble with the fact that even when you manually add an SSID, it doesn't pick it up? If so, then it's still your driver.

    You might want to try the driver broadcom put on their site (but they probably purposely almost hid). http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

    I could be wrong but that should fix it. Give us more info on your wireless NIC device if you're looking for more help.

    ReplyDelete

  2. Thank you for your suggestion. So far, I still have no success. The wireless card is...

    http://www.broadcom.com/products/Wireless-LAN/Wi-Fi-Phone-Solutions/BCM4318E

    I followed the directions on the README.txt file included with the driver as best I could. The results (copy/pasted from the terminal) are here...

    http://pastebin.com/m4cbfcdf8

    ReplyDelete

  3. asydik: You asked... "Are you having trouble with the fact that even when you manually add an SSID, it doesn't pick it up? If so, then it's still your driver."

    This is exactly what was happening to me

    ReplyDelete

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    ReplyDelete

  5. I tried the whole process again using Fedora 12 and I am happy to report that it worked perfect right out the box. Wireless, everything working 100%

    :)

    ReplyDelete

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    ReplyDelete

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  11. I am using HP DV4T 1000 Pavillion.
    I had similar situation with wifi in ubuntu before. Whats more? the sound was problem too.

    I am using LinuxMint right now. So far I have no problem with any hardware.

    I had to reinstall mint twice to get it working. If you are going to install LinuxMint don't install the upgrades first. Do the hardware detection..and use the second option..(not the firmware one). It downloads and installs. After a restart it works.

    Initially, when I installed mint and let it upgrade. it broke the path to repo for the drivers because it seemed like it was downloading the driver but it was not. So I installed WICD and got it working with windows wifi driver..but for some reason..the system was very unstable. It crashed and froze often.

    ReplyDelete

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