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 😉
Hello
i’m just a really new one in linux, and i want to know more how to install the same wifi card in the same laptop model cause many files here do not exist, and i don’t know how to proceed, actually i own linux UBUNTU
Thank u so mush fo your help.
Many thanks Imthiaz, your hints on getting ndiswrapper working on a zd8000 were v useful. I found I had to install an older version (ndiswrapper-1.40) to work with kernel 2.6.11 and the Broadcom driver that worked for me was the 2006 version from HP.
Now at last it’s working fine!
Many thanks again, Simon