So last night, I installed Fedora 8 on my laptop (HP Compaq 6515b). I like it so far, but I'm running into problems with my wireless card. It won't show up in the device listing. The drivers are installed fine, but I realized it won't show up because it isn't getting any power.

The laptop has one of those touch panel things above the keyboard to control volume and wireless. The volume one works (you just touch your finger and it mutes, or volume goes up and down, depending on which way you slide your finger), but the wireless button will not work. When the wireless touch-button shows as off, the card is off (makes sense). So I can't figure out how to enable the wireless card...

Any ideas? I think the two solutions would be to either find something in Fedora that can power it up, or to find different/better drivers for the hp-touch panel thingie, and then I'd be able to power it up through that.

Have you searched through the BIOS for the option to turn it on?

There's no option to turn the wireless card on/off in bios. In Vista, it would remember the last setting, and you could turn it on/off via the touch panel.

My friend is going to lend me his extra wireless card, to see if we can get that one working. Status update in a few hours. (Have to do calc homework first...)

That sounds like a really cool feature, too bad it doesn't work. Have you typed the model number + 'wireless' + 'linux' into google? Has anyone else had any success getting it to work?

I have, and to little avail. It's a buisness model HP, so it's slightly less common, and when I put the model number in, I just get eleventy billion pages trying to sell me the laptop.

I saw one page about the wireless working, but you had to use ndiswrapper or something. I think that allows you to load windows device drivers or something. I used it once a LONG time ago and it sortof worked, but it was a pain. I haven't had to mess with wireless on linux in years, and for that, I'm thankful.

We tried that, and the drivers are all installed fine. The problem isn't actually with the wireless card, it's with the hp touch panel, I think. It's not registering the "power the wireless card" button, therefore the wireless card isn't getting any power.

Also, my friend's card he was going to give me was the wrong type. Didn't fit. *sigh* Gues it's time for a trip to CompUSA.

Yeah...CompUSA....yeah....

Didn't CompUSA fold under?