portable, Broadcom Wireless Support, Compaq R3000Z, HP zv5000z questions

I'm thinking about getting a Compaq R3000Z Athlon 64 notebook which comes
with builtin 54G Broadcom 802.11 b/g. Is there any support for the
Broadcom chipset or is it just a useless appendage? HP is offering it as a
Free Upgrade on the Compaq version of this notebook. There is also an HP
version, the zv5000z, which according to the HP salesguy at hpshopping.com
is identical except for some additional bundled software and the color of
the case. So I'd like to hear from owners of either the Compaq or HP
versions about the Linux compatibility (especially with Mandrake 9.2 and
10.0) and their general impressions of this notbook.

I haven't had any luck trying the HP site for a few weeks. All the
links say that hpshopping.com is not available.

The site is fine, sounds like you have a problem with your DNS server.

I'm beginning to eye similar notebooks, so your post got me Googling
-- I'm sure you have done so already.

This one was the fullest account:
http://www1.uop.edu/ ~khughes/presario-r3120us/

Was disappointed that it doesn't run 64 bit code and it seems the
Broadcom requires ndsiwrapper (confirmed in a number of posts).

You might try, as the above poster did, to find a display version that
you can try out with Knoppix as a test drive.

good luck,
prg
email above disabled

I've already ordered it, enough people seem to be running Linux on it so
I know the basic functionality is there. I've read that Mandrake includes
ndsiwrapper so hopefully I can get the wireless card to work, if not it's
not the end of the world, my house is wired for ethernet. The wireless on
my old laptop works so badly that I've never bothered to use it, I just
use ethernet.

If you can't get the ndiswrapper to work, you can try driverloader
from

www.linuxant.com

I bought my license for $19.95 and had no problem installing it from
its installed web based interface. I will need your windows driver
for the wireless card.

Now if they could do this for video cards, especially ATI proprietary
notebook cards, that would be cool.

Just wanted to report that Ndiswrapper works fine on Fedora Core 2 (32
bit) with a 2.6.8.1 kernel. Certain scripts in FC2 don't work, ifdown
wlan0 for example. However ifconfig wlan0 down works fine.

If you compile NDISWRAPPER and change the default wireless ethernet name
from wlan0 to eth1, you may find that the ifup/ifdown scripts, etc. will
work. This has been my experience under Mandrake. I also found that
dhclient didn't like to function with wlan0, but did work with eth1.

Your mileage may vary of course... I haven't tried Fedora. I only use
Mandrake and Gentoo, and my laptop is a different model.

FWIW,
-S

I'll give that a try. I've been using ifconfig wlan0 down and up and that
works fine. I don't use the wireless connection much because I have
ethernet everywhere so I don't mind typing a couple of extra characters.
The important thing is that it does work and seems reliable. My old laptop
had a Linksys WPC11 V3 which had a native Linux driver that didn't work
for shit, if you turned on WEP it hung and the only way to fix it was to
power cycle the machine. I wish there was an Ndiswrapper like thing for
winmodem drivers that would fix the other big device headache.

well yes, but modems are really *very* cheap now so its not hard to
get one that does work.

NDISWRAPPWER works for me with broadcom on my son's laptop with RedhatX
where X is whatever the latest version before fedora was (I forget the
number). The card is a belkin. The configuration is crap and and
the card doesn't always respond but if I keep on trying it does
eventually. I have a script that does a reset to the card then
restarts the pcmcia. Eventually wlan0 comes up and the thing works
but I'm lost in the mystery of why the card only responds sometimes
(it works better when warm!) and where the code that brings up wlan0
is called from and why that code *eventually* works also if I call the
script repeatedly.

If it helps I'll chase up the detail.

I found what to do by experimenting with pcmcia cardctl commands,
most of which had no effect and eventually found a combination
that works reproducibly if I keep on doing it. The behaviour of the
card with these commands is about the same as my teeenage son when
he is asked to get out of bed in the morning - sort of really sluggish
and not responding but if you keep on at it eventually it works.

andy