Installing a driver for an internal wifi device

[WilliamHGatesIII]

I'm trying to install a driver for a broadcom internal wifi card on a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. I'm running Red Hat 9. I have the rpm file for the driver (which I downloaded from the Broadcom site) in a directory called 'linux' within the root directory. I type:

rpm -ivh bcm4400-3.0.7-1.src.rpm

And the response I get is:

error: cannot create %sourcedir /usr/redhat/SOURCES

Why do I get this message? What can I do about it? Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.



Also, I have the tar file in the same directory. When I type:

tar xvzf bcm4400-3.0.7-1.tar.gz

then change to the src directory and type:

make

I get:

Makefile:18:*** Linux Kernel source tree not found. stop.

Again, any info on what this means or what I can do about it would be appreciated. Thanks.

[sarumont]

The error that you are getting with the tarball means that you don't have the Linux kernel source on your system. You'll need to install a "source tree" (the directories, files and sub-directories that contain the source code for the kernel). You can download a kernel tarball to install at kernel.org or an RPM from your favorite RPM source.

[flw]

I also have a laptop with a wirless broadcom g chipset. The only way I could find at that time to get it running, about 9 month ago or so, was to purchase a wrapper app for the windex driver.

I don't like buying just a software driver or wrapper. If I have to pay, I'd much rather locate a used (ebay type of thing) but well known/support wifi card in the linux community.