Wireless on Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 with Fedora
Wireless on Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 with Fedora Core 3 (FC3) Linux
It took me the best part of 6 months to sort this out and I am posting this here in the hope it might help others...
I was happily using the integrated wireless on my Toshiba Satellite Pro with Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 1 (FC1) but on upgrading to Fedora Core 2 (FC2) and also FC3 the wireless card would not work. I tried all sorts of things but to no avail. I googled around and wasted hours, probably days on this and had resolved myself to using FC1 and struggling without my USB stick, wireless and sound.
This week I thought I'd give it a final go and thanks to greeners in this thread http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2550 there was the answer
It seems that the acpi refuses to share IRQ11 with the wireless card and sound system. Why it worked in FC1 I don't know. Here is what to do...
1) I did a fresh install of FC3 and in the boot loader options during installation I added the following to the loader options:
pci=noacpi
The other way of doing this would be to press a button to interupt the boot loader e.g. GRUB during boot and then edit the options.
2) Reboot (or complete install)
3) Use network manager to set up your wireless connection with the now recognised Intersil Prism II wireless card. Enter your network type, ESSID, encryption key etc. as appropriate.
4) Now according to that thread it is necessary to modprobe yenta-socket amd restart the pcmcia service. However, my system wouldn't play ball and generated errors. Just about to give up I decide to check the network config settings again. In the wirless card settings I found an option to start at boot. I ticked the box and rebooted and WOW it worked!! SO on my system at least, leave yenta-socket well alone and no need to restart pcmcia like so many others had.
As well as getting the wireless card working, my sound worked just fine. I updated the kernal to 2.6 and the newest udev and then I could hotplug my USB stick which brought up a USB drive icon on the desktop. 8)
Now, if only I could get Java to work...