Monthly Archives: March 2006

I tried to install fedora core 5 without burning the iso into cds. Normally I install them and then the cds are of no use. I use compelete install and I upgrade or install new packages directly from the interent. This way I have fedora core 2, 3 ,4 cds sitting idle with me. Oh my god all these distro increases the no of cds every time. This time fedora core 5 has 5 cds all together.

The next thing you need to do is to install Grub on your system. You download wingrub from here. Download the same and extract all files to your c:\. See that there is a file named grldr and directory named boot in your c:\.

Did I forget to tell you, you must have windows if you want to have dual boot system where you can play with windows and linux the same pc. Download the fedora core 5 cds from here. Once you download the iso you need to have winrar. You extract two files initrd.img and vmlinuz to your c:\boot. Or you can download these files directly.

initrd.img vmlinuz

Then you need to open c:\boot\grub\menu.lst and add these following lines.

title Fedora Core 5 Install
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

Then you need all grub loaded to your c:\boot.ini file for windows xp. It is very simple. Normally windows will not allow you to modify this file directly so go to control panel. In that go to system => advanced tab => startup and recovery => settings => system startup => edit.

Add these lines in the end.

C:\grldr=”Start GRUB”

Thats it. Now you have to restart your pc. While booting, it will give you options to boot. Select grub. Again grub will give you a lot of options, select Fedora core 5 Install.

The setup starts and you can install the fedora from local hdd directly. Select that option and direct to the location where all the cd iso are downloaded. Then you can sit back and install the core…. NO CDS but Fedora installed. 😉 😀

I made a big mistake of installing ndiswrapper for fedora core 4 using yum. It downloaded the latest kernel and source etc and compile ndiswrapper and I was not able to update any wifi drivers for my HP Pavilion zd8000.

After much struggle for so many hours I removed ndiswrapper using the yum. I wanted to reinstall ndiswrapper. This time I have decided to install the hard way by compiling from source.

For that I needed the source of current kernel source. I needed to download the same. To find out the current kernel version issue this command.

[imthiaz@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp

Then I downloaded the source rpm from this place http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/SRPMS/. Click here to download the src rpm.

Then install the source rpm..

[imthiaz@localhost ~]$ rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.src.rpm

1:kernel ########################################### [100%]

Then build the source

[imthiaz@localhost ~]$ rpmbuild -bp –target=noarch /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

After issuing the command we can see a lot of debug messages then it comes out to prompt.

Now you can start the ndiswrapper installation. A complete installation mannual is given here.

To find out the wifi card spec issue this command lspci -n and you find some text like this..

0b:03.0 Class 0280: 14e4:4318 (rev 02)

Next I download the windows driver for hp zd8000 wifi card. The integrated wireless card is the Broadcom AirForce One 54g. I download couple of drivers after reading reviews from many website and finally this one solved my day.

ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_3020_5020/driver/80211g.zip

After extracting the zip file we have install the driver for ndiswrapper. We can do that with following command.

#ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf

After this just follow the instruction from here

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation

from Load Module section. And all commands worked perfect for me from that section :-).

Then I added the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

iwlist wlan0 scan
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid ‘Goldcrab’
dhclient wlan0

I added the above lines so that wifi loaded and configured whenever I boot my laptop. Now it is working cool 😉