In my previous post I mentioned that I got the wireless adapter in my Compaq R4100 series laptop working with ndiswrapper. It appears this was a total fluke, others have had to add “noapic” kernel parameters to get it working correctly. I found if I set this kernel parameter the wireless adapter wouldn’t work at all; without it everything works normally.

Tested on Fedora Core 4 x86_64 (2.6.11-1.1369, 2.6.14-1.1656, 2.6.15-1.1830 & 2.6.15-1.1831)

lspci output:
03:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company: Unknown device 1356
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 177
Memory at b0204000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]

grub.conf:
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.15-1.1831_FC4)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb no_timer_check quiet ignore_ff_buttons=PWRF
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4.img

The majority of the hardware worked out of the box, the WXGA (1280 x 800) screen needs to be manually frigged into the X configuration. Only the wireless adapter and the memory-card reader are unsupported by the base install.

I got the wireless adapter (Broadcom BCM4318 PCI id 14E4:4318) working using ndiswrapper 1.8 from ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net, it built & installed cleanly into my 64-bit kernel. However, this means you must use 64-bit Windows Device Drivers. Thankfully the List mentions a similar attempt on a HP (HP/Compaq same thing) AMD64 laptop – it works!!

The memory-card reader seems to be harder to get working with mixed reports of success / failure. It appears to be a Texas Instruments PCIxx21, PCI device id 104C:8033 & 104C:8034.

And for my next trick…

Symptom

Trying to use hcitool returns the ambiguous error message "Device is not available: Success"

Solution

Start 'Bluetooth services' you monkey :'( .... I fell for this one and it took maybe half an hour of fiddling before I realised there was a /etc/init.d/bluetooth and that it wasn't running.

The default configuration of Fedora Core 4 with SELinux enabled causes problems when you want to use the UserDir feature in Apache Httpd.

Problem:

SELinux is stopping the httpd processes from accessing your home directory.

Solution:

From your shell ...

If you get the following...

It's probably because "index.html" is zero-length, I just placed an empty file in public_html and it failed first time, I removed the file and it went through the rest of it just fine.

Related Links:
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/Fedora
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq-fc3/index.html#id2825658