Going from Broadcom's sources to wireless card to WPA network

[stan]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2011 22:58:22 -0800
"Suresh Govindachar" <sgovindachar at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>   I read http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/README.txt
>   carefully;  and in each of the following attempts, I made
>   use of the instructions in the README.  I tried the rpms:
> 
>       broadcom-wl-5.60.48.36-1.fc13.noarch.rpm
>       kmod-wl-2.6.35.6-48.fc14.x86_64-5.60.48.36-2.fc14.2.x86_64.rpm
>       kmod-wl-5.60.48.36-2.fc14.2.x86_64.rpm
> 
>   which didn't work.  Then downloaded sources from
> 
>      http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
> 
>   and compiled on 2.6.28-18-generic Ubuntu, fc5, and rhel5 --
>   none of these worked either.

It seems that you are trying to apply current version RPMs to an OS
version that is approximately 5 years old.  *So* many things have
changed in that time that this is a major project.  If you did get them
to compile on the old versions, the compiled versions probably wouldn't
work on the new version because the library APIs have changed.

You could install the development group, and do it all within the live
CD environment, but that is a pretty big project also.  And unless you
put the result somewhere permanent, you will lose it when you shut down.

> 
>   Then I tried what I should have tried at the very beginning:
>   used an ethernet cable -- but F14 could not detect the
>   network even via the ethernet cable!

I haven't used a live CD for a while.  Do you have access to a root
terminal?  If you do you could check what is running as your network
service by running the command   chkconfig --list | grep 5:on | less.
You can page up or down, or use the arrow keys.  Typing a   q   will
exit. The network service is either NetworkManager (likely on a live
CD) or network, and one, and only one of them should be there.  In
either case you can run ifconfig eth0 to see if you have a network IP
address.  And if you don't, run ifdown eth0   to close the connection,
and then   ifup eth0   to bring it up. If you then run   ifconfig
eth0   again, you should see an IP address. There must be something
strange about the networking hardware on your system.  I haven't had
any problems with finding a wired ethernet connection for well over 10
years with various distributions of linux.

Usually there is a menu under System-Administration-Network that allows
you to do the same thing from the GUI.  That is, you can tell the
networking app to manually try bringing up the connection again.  If it
doesn't, you can then look in the messages as described below to see
why it failed.

> 
>   In thinking about moving from XP to Linux, I never expected
>   that just getting started with Linux would be such a hassle!

Usually it isn't.  Of course, different people have different
definitions of hassle, and what seems a minor glitch to me might be a
show stopper to you.   :-)  And vice versa on Windows XP.  I would be
lost if anything went wrong if I was working with windows.  The last
version I worked with was XP and I remember how blind I felt when
something went wrong.  Like being in a foreign country where I didn't
speak the language.

> 
>   To recap, the latest Ubuntu Live CD wouldn't even boot;  the
>   latest CentOS couldn't find the internal drive;  and F14 ended
>   up not finding the network.

CentOS couldn't find an internal drive?  That seems strange. I think
the latest CentOS is based on Fedora 6, which had no trouble finding
all my drives.  Is there anything unusual about the drive? What shows
if you run   blkid   in a terminal?  How about if you run   lspci   ?
The first should show all drives (actually partitions on the drives)
that were recognized, the second should show if the drive controllers
were recognized.

And if you type   less /var/log/messages   in a terminal do you see any
messages about your network or hard drive problem?  These are the
messages the kernel wrote as it brought your system live, and when it
has a problem it will usually write the reason it had a problem.

You can bring up a terminal via the menus, 
Applications -> System Tools -> xterm
or outside X,  Ctrl - Alt - F2 through F6.  Ctrl - Alt - F1 gets you
back to the GUI.