Wireless Problem on Fedora 8/9/10

This post is for those people who are not able to use wireless on Fedora 8/9/10. The problem arises in computers with Broadcom wireless cards as the drivers are not packaged with the Operating System. I first encountered this problem on Fedora 9. That time I had to use NDISwrapper to wrap the wireless driver. That was quite a tedious task.

After moving to Fedora 10, I had to again set up the wireless drivers. But what I found was that RPM's are available for Broadcom 802.11 STA Wireless Driver from rpmfusion.org for Fedora 8, 9 and 10. It means that you now have an easy way to set your wireless working.

To install the drivers using yum, follow the following steps :

1. Enable the rpmfusion non-free repository and rpmfusion non-free repository.

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'


2. Update & Install the driver.

su -
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

3. The installation is done. Reboot your computer. Enable Network Manager and you will see your wireless device working.

P.S. The above procedure is applicable to Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-,BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based wireless card.

You can check your wireless card type by typing 'lspci' command.
If the last line of the output matches the following line, then you are
having a Broadcom based wireless card.

0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43** 802.11b/g (rev 01)