Dell 1370 Wireless Card support???

[Johnny England]

I currently have a Dell 1370 wireless card, and I have been trying to find drivers that support the card under Fedora 8... does anyone know how to get this card working?

Thank You

[bbfuller]

Hello Johnny England

We'll probably need to get to know the actual chipset within the device, not the name on the label the manufacturer stuck on it.

If it's a pci device, use:

/sbin/lspci

in a terminal window and post back the parts that relate to it. 'Network' and 'Ethernet' are the sections of interest.

If it's a usb device then:

/sbin/lsusb

and post back the output from that.

[Johnny England]

Hello, sorry it took so long for me to get back on this topic, been very busy. I have a: "Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [Airforce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)". I found the correct files needed by ndiswrapper for the chipset... bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys. I know they are correct, because I was able to get the card working under ubuntu. However, in fedora i am stuck. Ubuntu automated much of the process and had a GUI for ndiswrapper. So, does anyone know how I could go about installing and using ndiswrapper under fedora 8 to get this card working? Thanks!

[bbfuller]

Hello Johnny England

I have a 4318 working in a laptop here and the good news is that it doesn't need ndiswrapper any more, at least in Fedora.

I can't speak for other distributions, but Fedora now includes the newish b43 driver for most of the not too recent, popular, broadcom cards.

If you haven't gone too far with ndiswrapper I would recommend using it. On my machine it's 100% reliable.

If you run the command:

rpm -q b43-fwcutter

and let me know the result I'll post you back some notes. As indeed I will if you decide to continue with ndiswrapper.

The point of the above command is to tell us how up to date your Fedora is. The b43 changed at least once since its introduction to F8 and the notes are slightly different.

[Johnny England]

The output for that command is as follows:

b43-fwcutter-011.3.fc8

Thank you in advance for the help!

Johnny England

[bbfuller]

Hello Johnny England

This is what I did to get mine working:

With that card you should only need to download the firmware, cut it and configure the card with NetworkManager.

Download this file and put it into a directory somewhere:

http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

Acquire full root rights over your machine with this command in a terminal window:

su -

That's a space and a minus sign after the su. It gives you full root rights over your machine rather than just root rights over your ordinary users environment without it.

Use the cd command to navigate into the directory where you downloaded the above file. Issue the command:

tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

That unpacks the file archive you downloaded and will create you a new directory where you are working called 'broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5'.

cd into that and then the 'driver' directory within that and use the command:

b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o

That cuts the required firmware for your card from the downloaded file and places it in the correct place for the b43 driver to find it.

Check and see if you have NetworkManager showing on the top Gnome Panel to the right in the notification area. If you have ignore the next part.

Go to the "Gnome System Menu - Administration - Services", tick NetworkManager and NetworkMangerDispatcher, make sure they are started and the settings are saved so they start at next boot.

Restart the machine and left clicking on the NetworkManager icon should bring up a list of wireless access points to connect to.

If it doesn't work there are a couple of possible things we may need to alter, mine worked without them though so we'll not complicate things if we don't need to.

Post back with any questions.

[Johnny England]

Well, you did it! I am writing this response via my wireless network. You have no idea how much this helped me out. Thank you! I will have to print out those instructions and save them for next time. Again, thank you!

Johnny England

[bbfuller]

Hello Johnny England

If you save these notes, be aware of the following web page:

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43?action=show&redirect=en%2Fusers%2FDrivers%2Fbcm43xx#devicefirm ware

On there it lists the firmware (the package you downloaded) to cut with the version of b43-fwcutter you have installed.

The b43-fwcutter changed from ver 008 to ver 011 during the lifetime of fedora 8 and there were options on that site for downloading different firmware packages. That may happen in the future so best to check at that time.