Wireless with the BCM43xx in Fedora 10

Unfortunately, the BCM43xx series of wireless cards is very popular in laptops today, but thankfully the popularity is decreasing. Fedora 10 is actually not difficult, but harder than Ubuntu, to use the BCM43xx cards.

Make sure you have root access. This cannot be performed without root access. This is for firmware version 4 and higher, my Acer Aspire 3690 used that firmware, so this is what I’m giving instructions for.
yum install b43-fwcutter

cd /tmp

wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

bunzip2 broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

tar xvf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar

b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

echo “alias wlan0 b43” >> /etc/modprobe.conf

system-network-config

I should have an external hard drive tomorrow so that I can install Fedora 10 then I’ll correct these instructions. For some reason my internal card doesn’t like these drivers (last I checked) but it likes the Windows drivers, so I may use ndiswrapper. Who knows?

A large majority of the post was forked from http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras.

This weekend was..

…read on…

On Saturday, I had a piano competition. To be specific, it was the Green River Piano Competition. It was held at Kentlake High School.

When I got to the campus, it seemed so new compared to my high school, which is about the second-oldest in the district. I’ve seen some of the Bellevue schools which look just amazing, and this is right next to them in quality. Apparently, there was a judo competition going on there, which really doesn’t go well with classical music.

I heard a mixture of composers, including Liszt, Beethoven, and Bach. I played a Bartok sonatina and a Bach prelude, and got a score of “1”. Four other people were able to get that score.

Sunday, we had a Christmas musical. I was to play Pachelbel’s Canon with two others as a prelude to the Christmas service. So, why have the service in January? Well, what stops us from having Christmas in January, or for some, June? Besides, there was so much snow in December that the service was canceled.

The play was about a young boy named Foster who forgot the meaning of Christmas and all  he wanted was presents. One of the cool parts in the story was when they turned off all the lights and the actors were wearing white gloves. They turned on ultraviolet lights, making everything that was white, including the gloves, glow. Quite a show.

After the service I headed down to Snoqualmie Falls. One of my mom’s friends told her that the falls were absolutely enormous. I had been their once, but when I got there, I was blown away, quite literally.

The falls, raging with all that floodwater, sprayed fine sea mist into everything it could reach. The sea mist created a thick fog, making photography there notoriously difficult. I did manage to get a few pictures where there was mist and where I didn’t get sprayed by it.

Now, I’m in a library, writing, or rather, typing this post. I wonder how this chaotic weekend will end…