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.
In Fedora 11, you will have to do a
yum install wget
first, but not ayum install b43-fwcutter
and usesystem-config-network
instead ofsystem-network-config
.