Fedora 3 on 2373JTU - No ethernet, no wireless

[Edward Mendelson]

I've been trying to install Fedora Core 3 on a TP42 2373JTU, which has the Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet and the IBM 11b/g Wi-Fi Wireless.

Fedora seems to recognize that the Intel PRO chip, but DHCP doesn't work at all and I can never connect to the network or internet.

The internal wireless isn't listed.

Time to get another distro???

Edward Mendelson

[Edward Mendelson]

Followup ... I gave up on Fedora 3, and installed Ubuntu 4.10 (i.e. 2004/October). Ubuntu recognized all the networking hardware out of the box, though I frustrated myself by trying to enter the wireless WEP key in ASCII, not hex, which is all that works. It's a bit flaky, but it's there.

I can't pretend to be very enthusiastic about the interface. Is there a distro out there that works as well as Ubuntu but looks a bit better?

Thanks for any suggestions...

[toolshed]

FC3 works just fine, with a little tweaking. But if you are looking for out of the box solutions, stick with Windows.

Dont give up on Linux so easy with a reinstall, there are a ton of linux resources out there, even sites devoted to t42 and installing Linux.

If you are looking for GUI support, then Linux is not it....the GUI support is more or less just window dressing...stick with the terminal for configurations . It is twice as fast and will make reinstalls a lot quicker...just back up config and reimport.

Google: linux laptops

[Edward Mendelson]

I'd be delighted to go back to Fedora 3, but any advice on getting the wired and IBM a/b/g wireless networking functioning would be very welcome. All the notes that I've found on the net are about getting the Intel Pro wireless to work - but this TP42 doesn't have the Intel wireless, it has the a/b/g.

Everyone else seems to report that the wired ethernet on T42 works on Fedora out of the box; can't imagine why this isn't working here. Any thoughts would be welcome. I certainly don't mind tweaking - but the advice I've found online so far refers to hardware that I don't have.

Thanks in advance for any specifics...

[toolshed]

That is the atheros nic?

[Edward Mendelson]

Yes, the wireless chip is the atheros. I'm beginning to see the possible route for fixing this, e.g. here:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2137

If you have more up-to-date information, I'd be grateful.

The other problem is the WIRED Intel PRO/Gigabit chip. The Fedora 3 install recognized it, but couldn't get an IP address over DHCP. This seems strange, because other people seem to have got this to work.

[toolshed]

Looks pretty close to what I did. What I did was hit all the linux laptop sites.

http://pmw.org/~gardnerj/Thinkpad/Insta ... g_Wireless

I used that link and moded the ifcfg-ath0 config to get it work, which took some tinkering....btw use that wavemon tool, u will see link on that site...it is good for getting wireless info.

But FC3 and wireless did not work out of the box, I had download and did a make install and did a config and I was running.

Look over that link and i think you will be good to go....if you have any problems, just holler....I can post of config file if need me.


Also, I think there is two different wireless nics for t42, so may work out of the box and ours does not.....

FC3 is pretty nice, I was coming from linux from scratch....to be honest I just wanted something on my new laptop that was quick and easy to setup...[censored] impressed with FC3.

[Edward Mendelson]

That's very clear and detailed - thanks! I'll give this another try after giving ubuntu a few days to see if I can live with it. I'm fairly familiar with the old Red Hat versions, and wanted to use Fedora if possible. Maybe the wired ethernet will work out of the box next time I install, if I'm lucky...

I see that the first trial version of Fedora 4 is due in mid-March, BTW. Maybe they'll have all this fixed by then??

[toolshed]

Oh yea, check this out.
http://fedoranews.org/contributors/carl ... a/atheros/

[Edward Mendelson]

Ah -- very useful, thanks!

[Volker]

1) The built-in ethernet works out of the box (FC3) using the e1000 module. I do not understand what went wrong in your case, but sounds like a network configuration issue.

2) The madwifi drivers will never be shipped with an official FC3 kernel as long as Atheros does not open up the binary-only "hal" in the driver.

[Edward Mendelson]

(1) Will try again with the built-in ethernet. Clearly something went wrong the first time.

(2) Sorry to hear that about the Atheros drivers. Do you happen to know why Ubuntu is willing to include drivers for the Atheros chip but Fedora is not? It seems to be a significant plus for Ubuntu.

EDIT - Now I understand: Fedora only has support in the kernel that matches what is "upstream" in Red Hat. Red Hat doesn't support the Atheros drivers, so Fedora won't either.

The instructions for installing the Atheros drivers out there aren't really step-by-step, and the latest news seems to be that you may need to specify the SSID on the command line every time you switch to a new access point:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=42924

New question: I was a Red Hat enthusiast back in the 7.x days, but haven't been back to it recently. What makes it so worth having, when something like Ubuntu or (reportedly) SuSE works out of the box? (I'm installing the free FTP-installable version of SuSE right now and will report on the results.)