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RPMs for the Broadcom 802.11 STA Wireless Driver are now available from the rpmfusion.org repos for Fedora 8, 9 and 10.

This is an official-release of Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware. This driver also supports the incorrectly identified BCM4328 chipset which is actually a BCM4321 or BCM4322 chipset.

Previously I explained how to build the Broadcom STA driver from source but now the installation and updates can all be taken care of using yum and the rpmfusion non-free repository. Just follow these two simple steps:

1) Enable the rpmfusion non-free repository.

The broadcom-wl and wl-kmod RPMs that we need are in the rpmfusion non-free repository. To enable this repo in Fedora simply do this:

su -c 'rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

2) Update and install the driver package

Now that you have the appropriate repository enabled, to install the driver package we first ensure that we have the latest updates and then install the "broadcom-wl" package which will bring with it the required "kmod-wl" package:

su -
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

That's all there is to it. At this stage you may need to reboot in order to enable the new driver and any new kernel that was installed during the update.

When future kernels are released a simple "yum update" command should install the new kernel and also pull in the updated Broadcom driver for that new kernel.

Update 15 November 2008: Just a note to mention that I've packaged this up into an RPM and so this driver is now available as an RPM in the rpmfusion repos for Fedora 8, 9 and 10.

See this post for instructions of how to install using the RPM version (much easier!).

Happy, happy days! At long last, a Linux Broadcom driver for the BCM4328 chipset that doesn't require ndiswrapper and Windows drivers. For me, this is really, really huge: ndiswrapper has never worked properly with NetworkManager using WPA security but this new Broadcom driver seems bullet-proof. It is even supposed to support 802.11n standard but I can't verify that just yet.

The source packages currently available from Broadcom (version 5.10.27.6) don't build on the current Fedora 9 kernel (2.6.26.5-45) and probably won't compile on any newer kernel either. Digging around a bit I found a patch that makes the driver build successfully.

Great, but that's not the whole story: I then found that with the new driver I was unable to SSH or telnet into any remote servers - bummer. However, some more digging turned up another patch that fixes this problem. With these two patches in place the new driver really rocks. For the first time in 10 months (since I bought my MacBook) I can actually connect to WPA secured networks using NetworkManager - no more fiddling around with wpa_supplicant scripts for me!

Anyhow, here's a little how-to guide to install the new Broadcom driver in Fedora 9. Note: I'm a little unsure of which Broadcom chipsets this driver actually supports but I can confirm that it works beautifully with the BCM4328 which is standard on MacBook 3,1 and 4,1 versions.

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Based on the patches found in this post over at Ubuntu forums I have created an updated synaptics touchpad driver RPM package for Fedora 8 x86_64.

As the original author notes, this makes it more enjoyable to use the touchpad while using the MacBook. It does two things:

1. Adds the option "MultiFingerButton" to synaptics. This allows us to configure the touchpad to right-click and middle-click by placing two or three fingers on the pad and then clicking the button. In my experience this is far more reliable than the "two finger tap" method of right-clicking.
2. It makes the mouse arrow more stable - I have found this to be a HUGE improvement in usability over the stock synaptics driver. With the original driver, if you put two fingers on the mousepad and release only one, the mouse arrow moves. This is the default behaviour in Linux and Windows, but in MacOSX, the mouse arrow stays put, and in my personal opinion, this is a much better behaviour. This patch makes it behave just like MacOSX. This may not sound much, but you'll find it makes a huge difference to the stability and usability of the touchpad.

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The latest 2.6.25.x Fedora 8 kernels have both ACPI_PROCFS_POWER and ACPI_SYSFS_POWER turned on and this can cause a strange problem with HAL which results in it incorrectly displaying the same battery twice and reporting incorrect charge levels for the "bogus" battery. This in turn creates problems with power management software such as kpowersave and gnome-power-manager.

I have only seen this reported on some specific x86_64 machines but it may affect other architectures too.

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Banshee 1.0 was released on June 5 2008. At the time of writing I haven't been able to find an official Fedora 8 RPM build so I have built my own using the Fedora 9 source RPM and made it available here for you to download and install.

For those that don't know, Banshee is a great multimedia player for Linux with support for iPod syncing, podcasts, streaming radio, video and lots more. For iPod owners Banshee is one of few viable Linux alternatives to iTunes.

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A few useful linux commands and their explanations.

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Big thanks to everyone who contributed to my birthday present of a weekend away in the Yorkshire Dales to do the 3 peaks challenge. We had a lovely time and to spare me the pain of telling everyone about it individually I thought I'd write about it here instead.

We completed the gruelling 25 mile trek including 1,672 metres ascent in just under 9 hours. The target time is 12 hours so we did pretty well. If you can't be bothered reading then scroll straight to the bottom for a gallery of our photos from the walk.

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This much I have learned: never, and I mean *never*, flash your computer's BIOS from within Windows.

I've done it before and never had a problem, but my luck ran out when I recently tried to flash the BIOS of an Acer TravelMate 6410 using the "WinPhlash" tool downloaded from the Acer website. The tool ran, backed up and erased the old BIOS, then crashed at block 5 of 16 when flashing the new BIOS. Result: a computer that won't even POST, nevermind boot.

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This guide shows how to use FUSE and CurlFtpFs to mount an FTP filesystem on Yellow Dog Linux 6. This guide presumes that you have already built and installed your own FUSE capable kernel for YDL 6.

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This guide explains how to build and install a custom kernel RPM with FUSE support on Yellow Dog Linux 6. The guide is written based on my experience with YDL on an Apple XServe G4 using kernel-2.6.23-9 on ppc architecture. If your system is different then adjust the guide as required.

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