[NCLUG] laptop wireless, anyone got a USB 802.11b adapter?

[hugh at mahon.cwx.net]

Hi Folks,

I'm typing this on my laptop (an HP Mini-Note) via the internal 
wireless interface.  The short version is that by building the latest 
version of the kernel (2.6.25.4) I was able to get things to work.

I tried with both the b43 driver and ndiswrapper with 2.6.25 and 
things didn't work.  I made sure to follow the directions provided by 
ndiswrapper on how to build the kernel and things didn't work.  During 
boot I could see the LED indicator for the wireless interface go from 
red to blue, then back to red.  In this case blue means that the 
interface is enabled.  Once again I Googled the error message that 
showed up in dmesg and got a new hit.  It was from an announcement of 
a change to the b43 kernel driver last week!  So I downloaded the new 
source and built it and on boot the LED stayed blue; a good sign!  
Interestingly using the b43 driver the interface wouldn't associate 
with the AP.  Perhaps I wasn't doing something right because otherwise 
it appeared to be working, but with no association no networking.  So 
I switched to using ndiswrapper and again the LED stayed blue.  This 
time it did associate and I was able to surf the net. 

So the Broadcom 4312 will work with Fedora now, although it would 
probably require a kernel rebuild.

Hugh