Hi I'm basically a newbie at Linux but I'm learning fast. I have got Mandriva One 2007 Spring installed and running almost totally fine on my PC. But due to it not supporting Creative X-Fi sound cards I am not going to use it as the primary OS on that machine. I am however keen to get Linux to run on my laptop (the aforementioned Pavilion zv6065).

I have run the distro from the LiveCD on the laptop. Most features seem to work ok (sound, touchpad, ethernet, display). Unfortunatley the key feature that I can't get to work is the WiFi. I have seen other people have had problems getting Broadcom's 43xx 802.11 hardware to run with Linux and I understand this is to do with Broadcom not releasing information that would enable drivers to be written.
I have found something called NDISWrapper which is supposed to help solve this but although the network setup wizard on Mandriva One gives me the option to use this (I have access to the Windows drivers) it tells me that it can't find NDISWrapper. (why is it given as an option if it doesn't work :S). I have tried to download and install NDISWrapper but haven't got anywhere with that even by following the instructions on the developers website to the letter (I get an error on the console telling me that 'make' is an invalid command)
Alternativly the wizard claims that a required file can be obtained from the Mandriva Club. Does this mean I won't get a totally free Linux to work on this machine (as Mandriva Club is not free)?

Another (but much less important) feature that I'd still quite like to get working are the shortcut program buttons (WiFi, DVD, Music Player, Internet) on the laptop as well as Volume Up/Down and Mute buttons. The memory card reader (SD/XD/MMC etc.) would be nice to have running as well.

I assume it's probably hard to tell if things will work if I'm only running Mandriva from the CD but I am holding back from installing it and messing with my partitions until I have more of an idea of whether I'll be able to get the wireless working.

The laptop specs are below in case they will help, I'm guessing that other members of the zv6000 family will probably share many of the same key components so these issues probably arent just restricted to the zv6065.

HP Pavilion zv6065EA
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1024MB DDR2 RAM
100GB HDD
Conexant AC-Link Audio
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
Broadcom 4306 802.11b/g WLAN
Texas Instruments PCIxx21 Integrated FlashMedia Controller

Apologies for the length of this post, it's really a few questions in one but any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

>Meej<

Welcome to LQ!

I can give you some advice on your wireless situation at least.

For the Broadcom 4306, both the bcm43xx and ndiswrapper are acceptable choices. For the bcm43xx, you need to create firmware files from a Windows driver using a program called fwcutter and then install them. The driver doesn't work without firmware, so this is a must if you want to use bcm43xx. I've got some instructions on how to do this on my help site (see my sig for the link) and hopefully that will get you started. One thing to keep in mind is that while you can have both bcm43xx and ndiswrapper installed on your machine, you can only use one at a time. They conflict with each other if they are both loaded.

OK, that's a problem, and probably not just for wireless. I'm guessing that you didn't do a full install of Mandriva, and that you (I'm guessing here) didn't install development packages. I've never used Mandriva, so I don't know the install procedure, but it is usually a good idea to install everything and then after a bit, remove stuff you don't use. Note that to get ndiswrapper running, you will also need the kernel source code installed.

No need to join the Mandriva club, at least to get wireless working. You've already taken the right steps, there are just a couple of bits missing.

Hi thanks very much for your reply, the links were useful! I've now managed to get the wireless running using NDISwrapper. Went a long way to convincing me to persevere with Linux as it would have been pretty useless to me without the internet!

Though I ended up getting it to work in Kubuntu rather than Mandriva and found that it seemed to be much easier to download additional packages and software.

cheers!
meej