I made a big mistake of installing ndiswrapper for fedora core 4 using yum. It downloaded the latest kernel and source etc and compile ndiswrapper and I was not able to update any wifi drivers for my HP Pavilion zd8000.

After much struggle for so many hours I removed ndiswrapper using the yum. I wanted to reinstall ndiswrapper. This time I have decided to install the hard way by compiling from source.

For that I needed the source of current kernel source. I needed to download the same. To find out the current kernel version issue this command.

[imthiaz@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp

Then I downloaded the source rpm from this place http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/SRPMS/. Click here to download the src rpm.

Then install the source rpm..

[imthiaz@localhost ~]$ rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.src.rpm

1:kernel ########################################### [100%]

Then build the source

[imthiaz@localhost ~]$ rpmbuild -bp –target=noarch /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

After issuing the command we can see a lot of debug messages then it comes out to prompt.

Now you can start the ndiswrapper installation. A complete installation mannual is given here.

To find out the wifi card spec issue this command lspci -n and you find some text like this..

0b:03.0 Class 0280: 14e4:4318 (rev 02)

Next I download the windows driver for hp zd8000 wifi card. The integrated wireless card is the Broadcom AirForce One 54g. I download couple of drivers after reading reviews from many website and finally this one solved my day.

ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_3020_5020/driver/80211g.zip

After extracting the zip file we have install the driver for ndiswrapper. We can do that with following command.

#ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf

After this just follow the instruction from here

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation

from Load Module section. And all commands worked perfect for me from that section :-).

Then I added the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

iwlist wlan0 scan
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid ‘Goldcrab’
dhclient wlan0

I added the above lines so that wifi loaded and configured whenever I boot my laptop. Now it is working cool

I really wanted to upgrade my Firefox in FC4. When I tried using yum it updated Firefox 1.0.4 to 1.0.7. I tried adding extra mirrors in yum configuration but no use.

Latter I found a manual method to update Firefox.

su or login as root first.
# wget ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/ .. /firefox-1.5.tar.gz
# cd /usr/lib
# tar xzvf ~/firefox-1.5.tar.gz
# mv firefox firefox-1.5
# which firefox
/usr/bin/firefox
# cd /usr/bin/
# mv firefox old.firefox
# ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5/firefox

Thanks to Philip for sharing this. I followed the same instruction to update Firefox 1.5.1 and it worked.

su or login as root first.
# wget ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/.. /firefox-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
# cd /usr/lib
# tar xzvf ~/firefox-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
# mv firefox firefox-1.5.0.1
# which firefox
/usr/bin/firefox
# cd /usr/bin/
# mv firefox old.firefox
# ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.1/firefox

Cool…

It has been really a good time working in Linux after a long break. I managed to download latest stable release of Fedora Core 4. The last version I used was fedora core 2. Once it was downloaded my plan was to install the Linux in my laptop (Hp Pavilion zd8000). So far I was using Microsoft Windows Xp home edition on my laptop. Single partition I hate the most. So I need to do a lot of backup work. Now the DVD writer was very handy. I backed up all my needed important files into DVDs. It took me great deal of time. Now I partitioned the same into smaller ones with capacity around 20GB each.

After that I installed Windows XP home into the main partition and kept one partition for Linux. And installing drivers and other needed stuff on window xp took some time. Then I burnt only the first cd ISO and rest I kept in the main partition. I installed the Fedora from local hard disk. I did this since I planned to install everything from the cds. I saved 3 cds ;-). I partitioned manually and It looks something like this.

Disk /dev/hda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 3187 25599546 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 3188 12161 72083655 f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/hda5 3188 5737 20482843+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda6 5738 8287 20482843+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda7 8288 9562 10241406 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda8 9563 9594 257008+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda9 9595 9725 1052226 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda10 9726 12161 19567138+ 83 Linux

The installation went smooth. It took nearly 45 minutes to complete. I booted up and so far all went cool. Some issues I faced

• My Screen was really bad
• Sound card failed
• And fedora needed some good apps related to playing media.

I don’t want to explain how I fixed these issues. And there were more issues and I fixed them too. I referred these websites to fix the issues. These guys are cool.

• http://www.humboldt.edu/~te8/misc/hpzd8230us.html
• http://jaymzworld.com/pages/zd8000.shtml
• http://www.iomonkey.com/linux/hp_zd8000/

Once I fixed all the issues mentioned above the fedora on my laptop was really cool and worked amazing. Did i forget to mention I didn’t log into windows for three days now.

Added few lines in /etc/fstab file to mount all my windows partition.

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see ‘man fstab-sync’ for details
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/shm /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sys /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win-1 vfat user,gid=users,umask=0002 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win-2 vfat user,gid=users,umask=0002 0 0
/dev/hda6 /mnt/win-3 vfat user,gid=users,umask=0002 0 0
/dev/hda7 /mnt/win-4 vfat user,gid=users,umask=0002 0 0
/dev/hdb /media/cdrecorder auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

I found If I install Yellow dog Updater, Modified (yum) it will make life easier to install packages for fedora. You can refer to http://www.fedorafaq.org/ if you wish to tweak your fedora installation.

Some commands I used to install new softwares.

• yum install vlc
• yum install xmms
• yum install firefox
• yum install gaim
• etc etc. Now updating packages and installing new on fedora is very easy.