I've been spending several days trying to get my wireless card working
under FC5 x86_64 on my HP Pavilion zv6000 laptop (it works fine under
WinXP Pro). It is set up as a dual-boot system, it has an Athlon 64
3200 processor, a Broadcom 4318 AirForce 54g wireless card, and 1 GB of
RAM. I've reinstalled FC5 twice in the course of debugging this
problem. After the installations, I've done "yum -y update" and "yum -y
install bcm43xx-fwcutter". However, on my most recent iteration, when I
try to run fwcutter on any of several firmware files I've downloaded, I get
"Sorry, the input file is either wrong or not supported by bcm43xx-fwcutter.
I can't find the MD5sum <hex strings> :("
...where <hex string> changes depending on which files I'm working with.
I've downloaded all sorts of files advertised as 64-bit Broadcom
drivers, but at this point, I get the above with any of them. During
previous tries, I've tried ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant as well; I did
refrain from doing anything with those this time around, as someone on
one of the forums I found (possibly this one; I don't remember)
suggested that trying to get them to work might leave junk around
interfering with the native support. I don't believe I had this problem
with fwcutter before.
I have seen suggestions to use the 32-bit version, but I'd rather not; I
got a 64-bit system so I could use it as such. I do want to use WPA,
but since I'm not even getting fwcutter to work, that's not really
relevant just now.
Does anyone know what the above message means, and how I can fix it?
Thanks for any assistance,
Mike