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I am having a bit of a problem getting my wireless network card working, it is a Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN MiniPCI Card and I am running Ubuntu. I have downloaded ndiswrapper and the windows driver but I am a complete newbie when it comes to Linux (in other words I don't know where to go from here) so if someone could break down exactly what I have to do step by step it would be greatly appreciated.
Probably the best place to start is the ndiswrapper wiki (see my sig for the link). They have excellent installation instructions and a good series of distro-specific instructions.
The other thing to worry about is the chipset that card uses. You might want to have a look at the output of lspci and see if it lists it. The reason you need to worry about it is that Dell cards frequently use Broadcom chipsets, and there is a native Linux driver for those that Ubuntu almost certainly has and it can conflict with ndiswrapper.
I can see that my wireless card is active (because it lets me check or uncheck it in the network connection menu),but it does not allow me to connect. I am thinking that maybe it is using the wrong driver? I switched to Suse 10.2 now because of different issues with Ubuntu. Anyway for what ever reason I can not set up my wireless. If you think that using ndiswrapper would work then let me know. If it is something really simple that I am just missing I am sorry, I am completely clueless right now as far as what to do. Again any help would be appreciated.
There are actually quite a variety of things that could be going wrong at this point, so until we have an idea of what is (or is not) happening, making any recommendations would be pointless.
So lets start from the top. If you post the output of lspci and lsmod, we hopefully will be able get you heading in the right direction.
I hope you know what all of this is because I have no idea. What is sad is that I just now realized that I had to be logged in as root to use "lspci". You can stamp newbie across my forehead any time you want. O I do have ndiswrapper-1.43 and bcm43xx-fwcutter-006 plus I have the drivers off of my disk. Everthing is on my desktop, I have tried building the ndiswrapper according to the install sheet but for some reason I keep running into this error
Roth:/home/bradleyaroth # tar zxvf ndiswrapper-1.43.tar.gz
tar: ndiswrapper-1.43.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Any idea as to why this is showing up? I am pretty sure I did ever step up to this point.... again any help would be appreciated.
Last edited by bradleyaroth; 05-06-2007 at 10:24 PM.
02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
This is from lspci. Since you've got a 4318 chipset, you probably want to use ndiswrapper. The bcm43xx doesn't work with this chipset very well.
In your lsmod output, bcm43xx is loaded and that will conflict with ndiswrapper unless you remove it prior to loading ndiswrapper (modprobe -r bcmr43xx). You should be able to block it from loading by adding bcm43xx to your /etc/modprobe.d blacklist file. Since you're using ndiswrapper, you really don't need fwcutter (that cuts out the firmware for bcm43xx) but you do need to be able to compile ndiswrapper:
Quote:
Roth:/home/bradleyaroth # tar zxvf ndiswrapper-1.43.tar.gz
tar: ndiswrapper-1.43.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
Either the ndiswrapper tarball isn't in your /home/bradelyaroth directory or you've had a bad download. The good news is that your command is correct, so there must be some other problem.
Quote:
You can stamp newbie across my forehead any time you want.
Hey, if I had newbie stamped on my forehead for every time Linux tripped me up, there would be one VERY rich ink vendor out there somewhere..........
You need to open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist in a text editor (you'll have to be root to save it) and add a line blacklist bcm43xx. You should already see a bunch of examples in that file, so follow those.
Thank you for all of your help, I am now wireless. I really appreciate all of your help, especially with me being extremely new to Linux. You guys are great over here.
hi. Could you (or someone) help me as well. After I modify the blacklist file and reboot the bcm43xx still seems to be loaded when I do the lsmod command.
Is this supposed to be the case? I also did the following command but it still seems loaded:
modprobe -r bcm43xx
hi. Could you (or someone) help me as well. After I modify the blacklist file and reboot the bcm43xx still seems to be loaded when I do the lsmod command.
Is this supposed to be the case? I also did the following command but it still seems loaded:
modprobe -r bcm43xx
Thank you in advance!
OK, a couple of questions:
- When you run modprobe -r bcm43xx, are you root? Are there any error messages?
-What distro are you using? It might be important.
- What exactly did you add to your blacklist file?
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