Member Avatar for Cudmore

Hi there y'all.

I recently purchased a beautiful little laptop, and of course, Linux was the first thing that had to be installed. However, I'm having trouble getting everything to work properly.

Among the trouble is that of installing support for my wireless WiFi card (internal "Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n WLAN mini Card"). Any help would be greatly appreciated. I was trying to install support for an Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG card, but now I'm not sure if that's what I want, considering the card is labeled Dell.

Anyway. Please lemme know if anything come up.. :surprised

  • 2 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 216 Views
  • 4 Days Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Cudmore
Member Avatar for John A

Get your hardware specs by running lspci, which is included with the PCI Utilities package. Once you know the exact model, Google to find the right module to install to provide support for the card.

Member Avatar for Cudmore

I always get such Logical answers when I ask questions here, one could almost expect me to have already tried such things.

I've given up on finding an actual driver, so I want to set it up using ndiswrapper.
My card is listed on the supported cards page: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List

Card: Dell Wireless 1500 (802.11draft-n/a/g) WLAN MiniCard

* Chipset: Broadcom BCM4321(?) (rev 01)
* pciid: 14e4:4328
* Driver: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R129083.EXE
* Other: ndiswrapper v1.22-rc1, Ubuntu kernel 2.6.15-26-386


But I'm having trouble setting up ndiswrapper correctly (apparently)..
I install my inf driver, and ndiswrapper says that it's a valid driver and the hardware is present, so all would seem to be fine, but then when I try to modprobe ndiswrapper, as well as at startup when the system tries to load it automatically, it fails to launch.

Here's what I get:

ndiswrapper: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
ndiswrapper version 1.10 loaded (preempt=no,smp=yes)
ndiswrapper (import:241): unknown symbol: ntoskrnl.exe:'IoGetDeviceObjectPointer'
ndiswrapper (load_sys_files:213): couldn't prepare driver 'bcmwl5'
ndiswrapper (load_wrap_driver:111): loadndiswrapper failed (65280); check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver'

And I don't know where to go from here...

Member Avatar for Cudmore

AHA! A solution is found!
I set up ndiswrapper to handle my wireless card using my Windows drivers..

I updated the kernel first:
2.6.16.21-0.13-smp --> 2.6.16.21-0.21-smp
And that added ieee80211 support.

Then I installed the latest version of ndiswrapper:
utiles version: 1.8
driver version: 1.23
vermagic: 2.6.16.21-0.21-smp SMP 586 REGPARM gcc-4.1

Then I installed the Windows driver for my WiFi card, added ndiswrapper as a Wireless connection with YaST, and everything's been working perfectly every since!

This laptop is starting to function beautifully. I've gotten a little help from the two forums I've been using, but so far it's been mostly independent work. I guess this is how you guys learn, isn't it? You figure stuff out.

Anyhow, I've still got the memory card reader to set up correctly, the webcam and mic, and the media buttons. That'll make a perfect system! Wish me luck :cheesy:

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.