Hp nx8220 and Wireless

[Sebastiaan]

Hi everyone,

Not sure if i should post this in either the wireless forum or the laptop forum so i'll post it here because i think it has something to do with my laptop instead of my wireless card.

Here is the issue. When in windows, i can turn on and off my wireless card with the use of a button, this quick lauch button has a blue light in it, which tells me if its on or off. Now the problem is that linux does not seem to support this, and therefore i cannot activate my wireless card. Ive tried setting up the bios, and been googleing for serveral hours now, but i cant seem to find the solution.

Ive included a link http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/q.../12228_ca.HTML

The button i was talking about was the number 28. Im running Fedora 6 on my laptop. Everything else seems to be working perfectly, just have 1 other issue that i cant update my pakages because it keeps telling me my network connection is not availeble, wich is kinda strange because i still have access to the internet. Anyway thats besides the point.

Anyone have any suggestions about what i can try to get this wireless thing activated?

[Roxoff]

Your problem isn't the button, you've probably got the broadcom wifi chipset that hp seem to love, so the problem is to do with the driver for the card.

Check your laptop specs, and if you have the broadcom wireless chipset, then make sure that you have all the wireless tools installed, and get bcmw-fwcutter from yum. Run this over the windows driver and it'll grab the driver's firmware, which you put in /lib/firmware. Then you can use 'system-config-network' to set up the wifi.

On my HP zv5000, the little blue light on the wireless button flashes with activity, and the button itself does nothing (although I believe I could map it to a script to enable and disable the wireless network).

[Sebastiaan]

Thanks Rox!

Im a total new player when it comes to the linux platform so im going to try my best to do as you just told me

Ill post my findings here soon...

[Sebastiaan]

Alright well i cant find the firmwire drivers for my card because the HP website gives me an .exe file in which everything is hidden.

The broadcom guys have put up a linux driver for the card, but im not sure if that is for the wireless card aswell. When i try to install it it gives me errors...

These are the steps they want you to follow :

1. Install the source RPM package:

rpm -ivh tg3-<version>.src.rpm

2. CD to the RPM path and build the binary driver for your kernel:

cd /usr/src/{redhat,OpenLinux,turbo,packages,rpm ..}

rpm -bb SPECS/tg3.spec
or
rpmbuild -bb SPECS/tg3.spec (for RPM version 4.x.x)

Ok well step 1 went perfectly step 2 i used the rpmbuild command because the otherone was unknown. it gave me this error:

make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i686'
CC [M] /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/tg3-3.66d/tg3.o
/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/tg3-3.66d/tg3.c:18:26: error: linux/config.h: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/tg3-3.66d/tg3.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/tg3-3.66d] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i686'
make: *** [default] Error 2
error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.4182 (%build)

RPM build errors:
Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.4182 (%build)

Any ideas?

Thanks Sebastiaan

[Roxoff]

No! Dont use this driver, use the one that comes with Fedora Core 6!

If you do an internet search for broadcom windows drivers, you should be able to find one that isn't packed into an executable. You need the seperate .inf and .sys files. Run the firmware cutter over these.

[smunsch]

Sebastiaan, if you still have your Window$ Partition, there should be a folder in C:\SWSetup calles WLAN. The .inf file is in there. I have the same problem on my HP Pavilion dv9000

[Sebastiaan]

The thing is guys,

Fedora and all the other recent linux disto's all recognize the card, and everything is find and dandy, only when i try to activate the connection it gives me the error...

failed to connect, check cable?

...

[smunsch]

hmmm. i saw a solution to that some where... I think it had something to do with changing some link or something. Also, the compile output above looks like you are missing some library (namely config.h). Can't help you there

[Sebastiaan]

I really hope someone can remember the solution to my "Check cable?" issue

thanks

Sebastiaan

[smunsch]

i found this, but the guy ended up havin probs. i didn't have time to read more. anyway,

Dannt, I got my card working properly with ndiswrapper last night. Here's what I recommend you do;

open a terminal and login as root using 'su -'

unload the broadcom driver module because it interferes with ndiswrapper

modprobe -r bcm43xx

install ndiswrapper if you don't have it installed already

yum -y install ndiswrapper

now find the windows drivers for your card (the ndiswrapper website has a list of compatible cards where you can find info on this), you want the .inf file I think, mine was bcmwl5a.inf.
Navigate to the directory where you have the driver and type

ndiswrapper -i driverfile.inf

(using my example it was ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf)

then type

ndiswrapper -l

and you should hopefully see a message saying that your driver is installed and the hardware is present (obviously your card should be in the slot )

Now you just type

modprobe ndiswrapper

and this will hopefully fire up the lights on your card and if you type

iwconfig

you should see the info on your card. On my system it picked up the settings I had stored using Network Device Control when I was trying to get the card working with the bcm43xx module.

If all is well at this point, check the output of iwconfig to see whether your card is wlan0 or eth1 or whatever and then edit the /etc/modprobe.conf file and add this line at the bottom

alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

(change the wlan0 to suit your settings). You can do this with 'ndiswrapper -m' but it didn't work properly for me (I had to change the wlan0 part manually anyway).

Now you need to make sure that bcm43xx doesn't keep giving you grief so add the following section at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

# Prevent bcm43xx interfering with ndiswrapper
blacklist bcm43xx

Now you should be all set when you reboot, you should also be able to use Network Device Control to activate/deactivate/change settings.

Let me know if this doesn't work for you. Cheers, Stu

The page is: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=497145

Good luck!