wireless on linux laptop

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Rick Bowers wrote:
> At 3/2/2007 11:47 AM, you wrote:
>> On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Vu Pham wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 10:04 -0500, Rick Bowers wrote:
>>>> I have a Dell D610 laptop. I've tried installing several different
>>>> versions of linux (k/ubuntu, linspire, OpenSUSE, FC, etc).
>>>> The distros install okay, but I can't get any of them to use my
>> wireless card.
>>>> The card is recognized. I get asked all the right questions; use
>>>> DHCP, What is the SSID? What is the WEP code? etc.
>>>> But not a single release I've tried will connect using that
>>>> interface. I've even tried another network "in the area" that does
>>>> not have WEP enabled. No go.
>>>> When I'm in the office, my wired connection works just fine. But I'm
>>>> only there about one day a week.
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts? Any way I can monitor what is happening or where
>> the failure is?
>>>>
>>>> The wireless card is a Dell wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI card
>>
>> Scratch my last email on this topic, I missed that you were using a 1370
>> card rather than the onboard wifi (why aren't you using that?).
>>
>> From what I've found by googling, there are no in-kernel drivers for that
>> card, as it uses a broadcomm chipset.  As such, you need to use the
>> ndiswrapper driver ( http://ndiswrapper.sf.net )
>>
>> See:
>> http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&safe=off&q=Dell+1370+WLAN+linux+ndiswrapper&btnG=Search
>
> Even though it identifies itself as a "card", it is actually built-in.
>
> I'll go do some more research. Thanks for the URL.
>
> Once I get the driver, I don't even know what to do with it. I've got
> some learning to do.

ndiswrapper isn't that hard to setup, i'm using it for the PCI wifi card 
in my son's system at home.  The dox on their website are pretty 
good, and once you have the initial setup completed, all you have to do 
is rebuild the driver every time you change kernels.  They even provide a 
spec file in the tarball, so you can easily build RPMs (whch is what I 
do).

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org