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Finally, after months of owning an HP zd7000, given to me by my brother, I have been able to get the wireless card to work in Linux. Sweet! The hard part was that the laptop's wireless card is Broadcom. That caused some real problems, because Broadcom has horrible Linux support(as in none), so I needed to use ndiswrapper to run the windows driver. Also I haven't had time to commit to finding a solution, but over the past few months I've been able to work a little here and there on it.
The base system of the laptop is of course Gentoo Linux. There's a couple of good resources. So basically what happens is first you need to install ndiswrapper. This will allow you to use a windows wireless driver in Linux for those cards that don't have Linux support. Of course the driver will not be as good as a native one, but it will work, and as far as I can tell it works pretty good. There's some documentation on how to install ndiswrapper, so check that out, it may involve some kernel configuration. After ndiswrapper is installed you need to get the driver file for the Broadcom chipset. This was a bit of a challenge to find the correct version that was needed. One of the versions I found that windows was using didn't work, so I found another one on some driver website. Todo: post the driver file here(ask me if you need it). Then install the driver by typing: ndiswrapper -i driverfile.inf Verify with: ndiswrapper -l If you get an error that says bad driver or something... like I did, go find another .inf file to use. Then push the wireless button on the laptop, it should light up, and then when you type: ifconfig wlan0 you should get some information about the wireless card. Then you need to associate the wireless card with an access point using the Wireless Tools. Check out the howto referenced above. I used the iwconfig option since I dont use WPA on my router as of yet. Once I got that all configured it worked. Great day. |
