After only a slight amount of pain, I got Fedora Core 3 installed and working on our laptop. The Windows installation had been acting quite funny (crashes and whatnot), so I thought before I just re-installed XP, I’d give Linux a whirl. Surprisingly, nearly all the hardware worked without tweaking — sound, video, network card, CD/RW — except the wifi card. Despite Fedora telling me it was a 3Com card, it’s really a Broadcom (perhaps the same thing?) 4306, which can work under Linux, thanks to NdisWrapper, a nifty tool that allows you to install Windows drivers under Linux. The only minor inconvenience seems to be the inability of the Fedora GUI tools to manage the card, which is under the wlan0 device. It’s easily configured with command line tools, however, so no worries.

Posted on 24 July 2005