danleff

I bet the one that is installed is correct. My guess, these systems came with either your card or the BCM4306 Board. Look and see what the pciid is for your card, by typing in; lspci -n in a console, as root user. If the card comes up as 14e4:4318 your good. If it comes up as 14e4:4320 then it is the BCM4306 card with a Belkin or related chipset, which the bcmwl5a.inf would be used for.

According to the ndiswrapper wiki, here, you have the correct driver. Try martouf's suggestion and install it again. You may need to remove the original XP driver install first. Just type in ndiswrapper at the command line to get a list of command usage.

Try downloading the required packages from here. Download the gtkspell-2.0.4-fr3.i386.rpm and gtkspell-devel-2.0.4-fr3.i386.rpm and install them in that order. Then try installing the gaim rpm again.

You probably just can't download any package for gaim. Is the package that you are downloading a RedHat 9 package or a Fedora one? I remember seeing an article about the older versions of RedHat and gaim with MSN not being available. Some change in the MSN code that blocked access. Any reason why you are not using Fedora? It will work out of the box.

Wow, you really did that at Walmart? Good for you! I never would have. This broadcom wireless should run with ndiswrapper. Install that package off the SuSE cds using yast. You then need the Windows XP drivers for it. Yes, I said the Windows XP drivers! I hope drivers came on a cd, but I bet not. If you have the drivers cd, look for the broadcom drivers on it. Let us know if you find them. You will need the .inf and .sys files to compile the driver with ndiswrapper. I wrote an article about it on my web page, but not for this wireless card. Let us know if you have them. If not, you will need to get them from another source. If you have trouble, I will take a look. But...I hate these systems, because often they are legacy cards built for HP and may take some doing to get it going.

You have a couple of options. 1. Install gaim that comes with Fedora. 2. Install it by source, which is apparently how you have been trying to do it. In order to install packages (programs) in Windowsease, you need development packages installed, not just the basic tools that do not allow installing packages from source. Quote: *** GTK+ 2.0 is required to build Gaim; please make sure you have the GTK+ *** development headers installed. The latest version of GTK+ is *** always available at http://www.gtk.org/. You can install install Fedora's version with Fedora's package manager, which will solve the "dependency" package issues (development files) or you can use Yum, which should do the same. If you choose to install from source, I suggest doing some reading on the subject first, especially since this may be your first attempt to do so. See the unofficial Fedora faq page located here. And...be patient. Many folks read these forums, with only a few that would have the answer to your question. I myself don't use Gaim, but can give you some basic pointers.

This may not be the best answer for you, but the solution would be to do the same thing that you did at your uncle's house. Get a NIC card and solve the problem. USB is tricky and the source of the issue. In the US, you can get an inexpensive NIC card that will wotk for about $10-20 USD. If this is possible, that is what I would suggest. The other thing you could try, is to get FC4 and see if support is better for the USB connection. USB device support is getting better. But perhaps others may have the solution for USB modem connections.

One of the more common problems folks run into is to keep trying to install different Linux distros over each other. I'm having a hard time sorting out what you did on each install attempt, but it sounds like the distros are not formatting the drive partitions correctly on each attempt to install. If you want to dual boot, I have found that different distros do not always like how the previous one set up partitions. What I would do is get a copy of Knoppix and format your partitions ahead of time with the partitioning utility included, qtparted. Or better yet, get a copy of PartitionMagic and do the same. Make three partitions, one for Mandrake, one for Suse and a small swap partition. There are also free tools to do the formatting, such as 7 Tools Partition Manager. Then, when you do the installations, tell the installer of the distro to do the install on each partition, one for Mandriva and one for Suse. They will find the formatted swap space fine. Each distrro should find the previous one and make an entry in Grub or Lilo to dual boot. Which bootloader are you using and are you installing Grub or lilo to the master boot record? Giving us an idea what system that you are attempting to do these installations on will also help, to determine if you need to pass any specific commands at install to suite your hardware. A specific one that comes to mind, are sata drives. Some systems, like Dells and Gateways, give some headaches, as they have a small hidden partition at the beginning of the drive that is really hda1. Post some system specs and this will help us troubleshoot more effectively.

Is this a Travelmate? Could you look at the users manual and tell us what video card that it has? Possibly an ATI card?

In Fedora, alsa is often set to mute. Don't know why. What sound card is this, or is it onboard? Try going root in a console and bring up alsamixer by typing in; alsamixer in the console window. See if the master setting (the first graphic bar) is set to zero. If so, use your arrow up key to set it up to almost 100%. Then hit the esc key. After that, type in; alsactl store Then see if you have sound.

I can only tell you what I found with my provider. They use dynamic ip as well, but you need to know the primary and secondary DNS numbers to get pppoe (Roaring Penguin) to work. Have them tell you everything and write them down. I found in Slackware, I had previously set eth0 to dynamic and it did not like that setup. Once I disabled dynamic on eth0 and brought up Verizon with the DNS values added, it worked. If eth0 is up at boot, pppoe does not like it, rather you need to have eth0 brought up through pppoe. My system is set up with the NIC card wired to the modem provided by Verizon. It works this way with two distros, Slackware and Puppy. I'll look at Mandriva and let you know as well. I should have something posted this weekend.

OK, I have it up and running. I have not used Slack for a while and have a few problems. However, I am posting from Slackware using DSL right now. I'll keep you informed. I had to set my DNS to static, but need to disable dhcp at start. Hmm...different from my other distros! What DSL service are you using?

Try this. Go to this page and follow the instructions to enable automatic admin rights for the recovery console. Then go to this Microsoft article to see how to recover the MBR.

Take a look at this fine article and see if it helps. Just to check, what filesystem is on the external USB hard drive?

I'll have to try this myself. I have Verizon. It depends on the distro, but you probably need to use the package Roaring Penguin. This allows easy setup of dsl connections. I'll look at it and let you know.

Oops! To many late night posts, or early am ones. Try; /sbin/iwlist ath0 scan How are you adding the values for the essid and WEP key? /sbin/iwconfig ath0 mode managed key xxxxxxxxx channel 6 essid <your essid value> Where xxxxxxxxxx is the WEP key and <your essid value> is actually the essid name. Then see if you get an access point by running iwconfig ath0. If yes (there are numerical/letter values for the access point) then... Once you do that, how are you trying to bring up the card? ifup ath0? dhclient ath0?

I don't think that the dos or Win 98 version of fdisk will see the Linux partition. The key is, what you have now. If a Linux bootloader is installed and dual booting XP and Linux, don't delete the linux partition, or you will lose the ability to boot XP. If you do, than the grub reference on the linux partition will be gone and booting XP not possible. You noted that XP was pre-installed. Does this mean that you do not have a full copy of XP which will allow you to restore the Windows bootloader from the cdrom disk? Some have reported that they have been able to recover the XP bootloader with a Win 98 boot disk, others have failed. This depends on a number of factors. If you don't need the disk space and you can still boot into Windows, I would leave well enough alone. If as JustBill noted, Windows was "taken over" by Linux (if your son allowed a full takeover of the hard drive), then you have no XP anymore. In any case, you need to do two things; 1. Restore the Windows bootloader or uninstall the current linux bootloader (grub or lilo, whichever you are using). 2. Reclaim the disk space, if you need to, with a partitioning manager. Let us know what your situation is and we can advise further.

OK, your almost there. You are using a router? If so, is the router using WEP and do you know the essid of the router? What command are you suing to bring up the card? ifup, dhclient? Type in a terminal window; /sbin/iwlist wlan0 scan ...and post the results. I'm going to amend my article with more instructions.

I assume that you are attempting to do the installation from a Mandriva boot disk? You need to know the partition and directory that the files are on. So, if the hard drive that the iso image is on is your primary master, the drive would be hda. If you have more than one partition on the drive then you need to specifiy the partition. If you have only one partition that the iso file is on, then it should be hda0. Then, specifiy the directory. Say it is in your download directory. Then when prompted for the directory type in; /download and hit enter to continue.

Are these sata drives by any chance? Where did you tell Fedora to install grub, in the MBR or on a boot partition?

I'm impressed with FC4. I installed it on my sata drive with no problem. Yum and installing packages from source were a breeze. I did (as you know) the HP drivers with my HP 6210 multifunction printer/fax/copier. I also compiled the madwifi drivers without incident. I will try my DSL connection next. I just downloaded Mandriva 2006 on dvd and will try this over the next week. Some day a raid0 array. I may seek your help on this!

Is this dialup, cable or DSL? How many machines are you looking to set up? If you have a cable or DSL connection, how many ethernet ports are on the modem? If you have cable, does the ISP assign addresses statically or dynamically? Knowing youe specific needs will help answer your question.

Here is a rough draft of how I did it. The important thing to note, is that you need both packages; madwifi-kmdl-2.6.13-1.1532_FC4-0.9.6.0-18.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm madwifi-0.9.6.0-18.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm

Here is is an article about kdesu usage. Yes zenarcher, you are right, my HP Officejet 6210 works in Fedora using the HP provided drivers. The scanner works in xsane, as well. Nice!

The first thing to do is defrag your windows partitions. This will prevent any potential data loss in partitioning your free drive space. Dual booting is common and is not hard. First look at the Unbutu wiki page on the subject, located here. Look at the first two sections of the article. Also look at this article which discusses the subject of dual booting with XP (which is the same as with 2000 for arguments sake).