Installing Fedora 13 on HP mini note 5102

This would be a really short blog since Fedora 13 is smart (read: Advanced) enough to hit the ground running on HP mini 5102 netbooks. The only tweak you might have to do is installing wireless driver from Broadcom. Marvell Ethernet NIC works fine out of the box on Fedora 13, thanks to 2.6.33 kernel.

For wireless, here is what you need to do:

You basically have 2 options:

1- Install the driver manually
2- Install it through RPMfusion

I cannot think of any reason why you would want to go with option#1 since it'll make you do the drill every time you have a Kernel upgrade, which is quite common in with most Linux distros. If you still want to go with option#1, please jump to the end of this page.

This is how you can install wireless drivers using RPM fusion:


rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable...
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-...
yum update
yum install kmod-wl


For those who only have wireless Internet, here are the packages you need to download from another system and copy it on to your Fedora:

Install kmod-wl-5.60.48.36-1.fc13.7.i686
Dep-Install broadcom-wl-5.60.48.36-1.fc13.noarch
Dep-Install kmod-wl-2.6.33.5-112.fc13.i686-5.60.48.36-1.fc13.7.i686

Installing it manually:
=================

For those who really want to do it manually because of whatever reason, here are the instructions:

Download the driver from here: http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

You'd also need kernel-devel packages + gcc to make the install work since you have to insert the wireless module into the kernel. Rest of the instructions can be found in the README file which comes with the Broadcom driver and it is pretty straight forward to follow.

Hope this helps.

--
shiraz