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

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A short expert note added to the thread: ’s approach (upgrading the kernel and using ndiswrapper with the Windows driver) is a valid and practical rescue path for older Broadcom-based Dell cards when a native Linux driver or firmware is not available. ’s original suggestion to identify the card with lspci is exactly the right first diagnostic step; knowing the vendor/device ID determines which driver path to try first.

In almost every case today the recommended order is: identify the device, try the native kernel drivers (b43 / brcmsmac / brcmfmac), and only fall back to ndiswrapper if no native driver works. Many Broadcom chips are supported in mainline kernels but require non-free firmware files supplied by distribution packages rather than being redistributed by the kernel itself. (wireless.docs.kernel.org)

Quick, repeatable diagnostics and the usual fixes you can try now:

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 network
sudo dmesg | grep -i -E 'b43|brcm|wl|ndis'
lsmod | egrep 'b43|brcm|wl|ndiswrapper'

If the card maps to a b43/brcmfmac driver, install the distro firmware helper package (examples: firmware-b43-installer + b43-fwcutter or firmware-brcm80211 / linux-firmware), blacklist conflicting modules, then reload the driver. See distro driver guidance for which firmware package to use. (wiki.debian.org)

If you must use ndiswrapper: build/install ndiswrapper against the exact running kernel headers, use a Windows XP/NDIS5 driver (NDIS6/Vista drivers are unsupported), and verify ndiswrapper -l then modprobe ndiswrapper; check dmesg for vermagic/unknown-symbol errors if the module fails to load. Building instructions and common pitfalls are documented in the ndiswrapper project and distro help pages. (sourceforge.net)

Practical takeaway: for long-term stability prefer the native driver + firmware route; use ndiswrapper only as a fallback and make sure it is compiled against the exact kernel you run.

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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:

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

* Chipset: Broadcom BCM4321(?) (rev 01)
* pciid: 14e4:4328
* Driver:
* 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:

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