Since my wireless has a Broadcom chip, it does not have a native Linux driver. Fortunately, we have an open source driver for this chip. It is created by the enterprising programmers at bcm43xx (see resources). This driver is included by default (but not loaded) in FC5. However, you need to enable wireless manually since there are some timing issues with the SoftMAC software that this driver relies on. Here is the procedure to enable wireless on this laptop.
Download the fwcutter software from the same source as the bcm43xx driver (see resources). Once you do that, locate your windows driver (the sys file) that came with your machine or simply download the windows driver from the HP page. Once you have located the sys file, you can use the fwcutter (firmware cutter) utility to extract the firmware. Copy the firmware files (*.fw) to the directory
cp *.fw /lib/firmware
Once you do this, you will need to execute the following instructions one at a time:
modprobe bcm43xx #Need this since FC5 does not load this automatically
ifconfig eth1 up #depends on what your wireless is named. Also your wireless should come on!
iwconfig eth1 essid your-essid
iwconfig #to check if you have association with your AP
iwconfig eth1 rate 24M #sometimes you are advised to use 11M. My wireless works with 24M - your mileage may vary
dhclient eth1
That is it. You should now have wireless connectivity! You will see a whole bunch of information in your logfile. If you are not able to connect, this information should be helpful to you for debugging purposes.
Next thing to note is that, it is time to run your updates. Considering that I am installing FC5 so close to the release date, I was not expecting a whole lot of updates and I was not disappointed. There were only about 55 packages to be updated. Considering that I have a very fast connection, this was not a very arduous task.
I also do not like the default FC5 background page. So, I set about customizing my desktop to my liking. I used my own background. I also added the applets for network connections, System monitor, and weather. I customized these to my computer, the network connection requires that you type in the name of the connection before it will show me any activity. The weather was configured for my area and set the temperature to show in Fahrenheits rather than Celsius. One last thing I don't want to forget is that to get a decent set of fonts, you really need to install the Microsoft core fonts that were once made publicly available. These fonts will give you some nice options to change your system - for instance, I am using "Comic MS" as the default font on this system.
The next most important thing is to activate the freshRPMs repository (see resources) if you hope to get any entertainment out of your laptop. You can do this manually by creating a repo file, let's call it appropriately enough freshRPMS.repo, and type the following information in that file:
[freshRPMS]
name=FreshRPMS for Fedora Core 5
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/5/$basearch/freshrpms
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
Save this file to /etc/yum.repos.d/ and you are in business. Next up, we will look at doing some useful stuff.