Tethering home wi-fi networks? never heard of that. Since my iPad doesn’t support hotspot, how do you do this on apple devices?
It might be that only cellular iPads support tethering.
If this is not your case, and you don’t have the smartphone tethering option available either (since you didn’t bring it up), I guess what’s left is for you to find a solution to connect your laptop to the router via ethernet.
One last thing, I see you had a Fedora 39 iso, Get the latest iso and see if that works. If not and you said Windows, Ubuntu or Zorin OS options worked for you, you might have to stick to those.
New linux kernels often have problems with network hardware that relies on non-free drivers. I find it necessary to have USB WiFi and bluetooth dongles (with Intel or Realtek hardware) for the times that the non-free drivers aren’t available when a new kernel arrives. Another option is an ethernet to wifi bridge.
I haven’t tried Ubuntu or Zorin OS
And since this is my only computer, I’ll wait until I can borrow my friend’s one, then I could switch back to Windows, update Fedora or try another distro.
I was meant to say switch back to Windows, and not the other distros I mentioned, sorry for the slight confusion
do i really need an ethernet cable to install these drivers?
In principle you could download rpm packages to a USB key and install them, but it is not simple to identify all the packages needed. That could be a useful learning experience, but it is far easier and less prone to errors if you can arrange internet access. USB dongles are not expensive, but chose one that is known to support linux and avoid those that don’t state the chip used as bottom-feeding vendors sell dongles with varying chips under the same model name.
You would really need internet to install the drivers the easy way. So it is one of the following: Ethernet, WiFi dongle or smartphone USB tethering.
The alternative (installing packages locally) is cumbersome, as mentioned by @gnwiii above.
Hello @fireinthehole345 ,
I have an old (2003) Dell with a Turion CPU, and it always has difficulty with the wireless connection. One thing that always seems to be an issue is the enabled state of the device. My laptop has both an enable option in the BIOS and also via the Fn keys on the keyboard. I find if the device is disabled via keyboard action, even if enabled in BIOS, Fedora does not even see it. It doesn’t help the drivers for the wireless interface are at least partially proprietary, even when I manage to get it going I cannot get 802.11g.
Try nmcli d
(in a terminal if not already obvious) to get a look at what your network manager is seeing. Please do this from the installed Fedora 39 system you have.
I think it’s weird that it’s not.
Given its importance to figuring out what’s going in a system that has problems, I think that it should be included by default in the vanilla version of Fedora Workstation, and I’m surprised that it’s not.
Most of the Hardware is posted in Gnome’s Settings :
Although I do understand why it should be in the default install. Maybe @jrredho could do a change-proposals for inxi
to be included in F41
Reminded me of the days of needing ndiswrapper on Ubuntu and an Ethernet connection
You probably don’t need an Ethernet, but options vary. I think with ndiswrapper the alternative was downloading multiple firmware files ahead of time and copying them around manually, where with an internet connection it downloads and does the stuff at install time. You can certainly do it and I’m sure there’s instructions around, but I’d sooner just drag my desktop to the router and have a 1ft Ethernet on it for 5 minutes.
If you haven’t gotten it by now, I’d probably reconsider using Linux. This isn’t exactly a common issue, but I have yet to see a concise solution posted and I know I wouldn’t be waiting 11+ days for people to just be talking about different ways of showing hardware (it literally says Broadcom in the first post pic of lspci).
I suggest looking at lspci for the Broadcom card, take that number, put it into a search engine with “Ubuntu”, and get a general idea of if other people have it working. Then take Ubuntu 23.10, put it on a USB, boot it, and try it. If it works, I’d recommend installing it and going with it as Fedora isn’t offering you anything beneficial if it can’t get wifi working without a 3rd-party repo and other manual config.
Gnome Settings encourages posting screen captures that won’t be found with text searched, misses sound and network hardware, and is short on details that can help form a complete picture of the hardware.
You might,
But it is extremely easy to configure the 3rd party rpmfusion repo as shown here and once done then it is also easy to install the broadcom drivers with sudo dnf install broadcom-wl
. Wait a few minutes then reboot and the drivers should load and the network adapter should be available.
2 command line entries and the drivers are loaded. Cannot be much simpler.
True. But apparently the OP doesn’t have the means to connect to the internet (Ethernet or otherwise). Is there a way for him to find out what exact packages are needed and instruct him how to download them from another machine, and then install them on the Fedora system locally?
That is, in case @fireinthehole345 is still with us.
Sure, as long as we know the exact wifi chipset that he has.
lspci -nnk | grep -iA4 -E "network|wi-fi"
should give the info needed for that.
Once the chipset is identified then it is possible to devise a plan to get the drivers.
As has been mentioned already, it is much easier to use a wifi dongle that is supported and connect to the internet then install what is needed that way. Usually about $20 or so from lots of places (including amazon)
This one seems to use a realtek driver and has a link to directly download the driver if not already installed in fedora. It is listed for $22
Am I missing something with the first post? It’s a BCM4352.
No, you did not miss anything.
The package broadcom-wl has a very long list of dependencies that are not installed by default. It comes from the rpmfusion repo, and most of the dependencies are from fedora. It takes quite some digging to identify the dependencies (which requires following the tree from top to bottom so all the dependencies of dependencies are identified) and then to download all of them so they could be installed. Even Broadcom has several different chipsets. It will have a list of between 20 and 40 packages to be installed as dependencies.
Much simpler and easier to get the dongle as suggested a couple times here, get on the internet, and allow dnf to work out the dependency list and pull everything in as needed for support of the broadcom chipset.
I personally could, but would not, build that list of dependencies. I do not dedicate my time that way.
As noted, the list is probably long (the driver requires compilation, so needs -devel library packages) and updates that arrived while the list was being compiled could be missed, so a couple iterations might be required. I’ve encountered badly broken systems after users tried to update from RPM’s they downloaded manually.
Problems with WiFI (and other hardware that requires non-free drivers) are the norm when upgrading to recent kernels, so having alternatives for “mission critical” functions (internet access, and sometimes bluetooth, sound, camera, etc.) is nearly as important as having backups of essential files.