Little help please (wireless)

[johnmeikle]

Hey guys. I just recently downloaded Fedora 8 Live CD and burned it to a disc, but I've encountered a few problems. Fedora 8 boots up fine and I'm presented with a nice desktop. But my wireless isn't working, I've found some solutions which require me to use the terminal. But before I get to that I'll explain a few things, my network adapter is called "LAN-Express AS IEEE 802.11g PCI-E Adapter", I was reading on a website that my adapter uses the Atheros chipset but this doesn't seem to work with my adapter as Fedora 8 uses this for my card by default in the Network Properties. Now, I read somewhere else that my card also supports the "orinoco_pci" driver, I don't know if Fedora 8 has this but I was told to enter the following command into the terminal.

modprobe orinoco_pci

But the terminal returns "modprobe is not a recognised command" (well, something similar). I don't know if this is the live cd's fault with limited system software installed or what. But I would like to know how to get this modprobe command working, do I need to install 3rd-party software? If so from where?

I've found numerous articles on how to get wireless working but it either fails by not working at all or the terminal just returning "* is not a recognised command".

I'm pretty much new to Linux and would like to try Fedora out. Much help would be appreciated.

John

[smolloy]

On the subject of modprobe not being a recognised command, did you try to perform this command as a regular user, or as root. Modprobe is a command that only root has access to, so you should use

su -

(the dash is important!)

This will give you access to root-only commands.

[johnmeikle]

Ah I see. I've tried it with just 'su' but it didn't work. I'll try this then since you say the dash is important.

[johnmeikle]

Right. 'su -' works great but my wireless is still not working with that command. So I guess I'll need to try and find out how to get it working.

EDIT: Thanks smolloy for the help, I really appreciate it man.

[smolloy]

No problem. Sorry you're still having trouble.

FYI: When you use su to become root, you get the full root permissions, and you will be allowed to do anything that root can do. The problem is that you still have all the environment variables defined for the normal user. When you add the dash to the su command, that makes sure to pick up the full root environment, including the path.

Modprobe is a command that isn't on a regular user's path, but will be on root's path. That's why you needed to use the dash in this case.

I'm in the habit of always using the dash -- it prevents problems like these.