Wireless on a Dell Inspiron?

thesun · #1 11th June 2005, 04:34 PM

I've had almost no problems with my Dell Inspiron 1150 except that the wireless lan doesn't seem to work. I've heard that there is a driver ndiswrapper which runs it but can't seem to figure out what the steps are to get this to work. Has anyone used this before? Are there any good resources out there you found useful? Many thanks in advance...

thesun · #2 11th June 2005, 04:35 PM

Sorry, I'm using FC3 ISOs, if that helps. Nothing modified. I believe the card is a TrueMobile, but I don't know how to check that.

kg4cbk · #3 11th June 2005, 06:17 PM

The first thing you should do to get wireless going is figure out what chiipset the card you have uses. Their may be native drivers supporting it. To check the chipset run the command: lspci

You should find your card liisted and what chipset it uses.

If you can't use the prism54 driver or madwifi you can use the windows drivers by using ndiswrapper or driverloader. I have not used ndiswrapper. I have used driverloader and it is very easy to use. There is a small fee for driverloader but IMHO it is worth it.

Note that using ndiswrapper or driverloader may prevent you from using certain programs like kismet.

georges · #4 11th June 2005, 06:22 PM

I have an inspiron 220 and had the same problem, broadcom, the company that developps the wifi cards doesn't give any drivers for linux, so u're obliged to emulate, here's the steps u should do:

1-download the windows driver (i have dell truemobile 1250 and i downloaded R90501.exe and it works just fine).

2-u should have wine which is a windows emulator

3-u download ndiswrapper

4-u go into the directory that contains ur driver and then do:
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf (or if it's different for a different driver a file with .inf extension.

5-to verify, u make ndiswrapper -l, u should get:
installed ndis drivers
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present

6-the u load ndiswrapper:
modprobe ndiswrapper u should get
ndiswrapper version V loaded

7-u should download wireless-tools that gives u tools to manipulate ur device

8-then u go into ur wireless tools and verify if the interface is available:
iwconfig
u get plenty of network cards u have, u should have one with wireless extension (normally wlan0)

9-now u have ur device installed u can see in wireless tools what u can do(like scan for hot point ...)

But u should do it every time u load, there's a more complicated maneuvre to do it automaticaly on every boot (actually u should do a couple of things, grosso modo, u should add the ndiswrapper module into startup (modprobe.conf))

georges · #5 11th June 2005, 11:14 PM

I'm sorry i missed a step , actually u don't need wine, when u download the windows driver, create a directory and put it in it, and then in a terminal enter to this directory and type unzip R90501.exe(or ur driver), and then u'll get multiple files including ur .inf file.

thesun · #6 13th June 2005, 04:22 AM

Thanks very much, georges, for the step by step. This looks like it's do-able, and I'll hopefully get it up and running soon. If not, I'll post a reply with whatever problems are there. If you know more about getting this to work automatically at boot that'd be great...I'm not sure I want to do this setup each time I want to check the internet. ;-)

Thanks so much...