Sat, 18 Oct 2003
Linuxant DriverLoader for Broadcom 802.11g Works With Emachines M5310 and Fedora Kernel 2.4.22-1.2088.nptl (Athlon)
Well, after a little work (which I suspected yesterday) I was able to get the linuxant driver loader to work on my EMachines M5310 running Fedora and the latestkernel. Linuxant is to be credited for their RPM install and webconfig, which are among the best I've seen anywhere.
I determined that my Linux and Kernel version were unsupported and so thoughtfully, Linuxant provides an RPM download of their driver. When I rpmed it, I was told I needed kernel source. I then did "yum install kernel-source" and let yum take care of the details. Once that was complete, I proceeded to rpm -ivh on the linuxant rpm and indeed it built the driver as part of the RPM install. When it finished, it told me to go to port 18020 on my localhost with my browser. Once there, I was prompted to login as root, then stepped through a series of configuration questions wizard-style.
The toughest part is finding the proper INF and SYS files from the windows drivers. These are not on the driver CD-ROMs provided by emachines. Sigh. I found them on the Windows partition under C:\Program Files\WLAN\PCI. I copied those to a network share, rebooted and then copied them into my linux partition, went to 18020 webconfig again, and went through the install just fine. I was afraid that linuxant's license was going to be a nightmare but they connect right through from the driver config and since I hadn't disabled my trusty orinoco, I had the required internet access. Once the license was installed and the MAC address interrogated, the driver was configured.
I then proceeded to Redhat's System Settings/Network utility and indeed, the linuxant driverloader had appeared as eth2 under the hardware tab. I added an eth2 for it and this is where I ran into a problem. which was a couple messages about bad parameters when I tried to activate the new eth2. I found a note on the internet about the bad parameters, which appeared to be related to the ESSID. So I set the ESSID manually and it worked! I'm assuming that's a bug with my particular setup, but it was a minor workaround and it's a joy to not have to worry abou the damn orinoco card sticking out the side of the machine anymore.
I've started a bunch of massive ISO downloads just to stress the thing while I'm out this afternoon but I remain hopeful. Assuming it works reliably, it's definitely worth whatever small price linuxant asks for it after the trial period is up.
Posted at: 13:48 | permalink
