Saturday, November 23, 2013

ASUS G750JX in Fedora

Playing with my ASUS G750J - fresh off the CentOS install, no networking interaces :(

New laptop, better run a new distro :) Fedora 20 beta did a great job of recognizing the on board nic, athough not the wireless. Apparently Broadcom isn't eager to release their stuff as open source, so nobody has it included. To install the broadcom wireless, add the rpmfusion repo's, and then run

yum install kmod-wl

This is a lspci from my laptop, fully functional in Fedora 20 beta.

03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4352 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA8171 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)

There are several hardware specs for the G750 laptops; to make sure this applies to you, check device manager in the pre-installed Windows 8.1. Windows recognizes these as

broadcom 802.11ac
qualcomm AR8171/8175 gig eth


The sources I'm using to install the drivers in CentOS are

NIC
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/alx

Wifi
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php -> you will see in the readme.txt that some distros already have a driver - like the "yum install kmod-wl" for fedora/rhel/etc.