Dell Inspiron 1720, Ubuntu and Mint 10 no wireless connection
 

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop pc with Win7 Home Premium. I just dual booted first Mint 10, then Ubuntu10.1, and neither recognizes the wifi installed.I have Broadcom 440x10/100 Integrated controller, Dell wireless 1395WLAN mini card and Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter on the pc.

Hello,

Can you post the outputs of lspci, lsmod, and ifconfig -a for me? Thanks man,

Josh

Ok, when I tried to configure VSN, it says "firmware missing"

Hello,

What is VSN? And can you give the output of the commands like I asked in order for me to help?

Josh

John I donmot know what those things are or how to find them, I am a newbie

It's a Dell, so it's likely a Broadcom wireless chip.

Run lspci in a terminal and I'll bet dollar to a doughnut it tells you that there's Broadcom wireless.

If so, this might help:

http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

Plus there are scads of threads on LQ about Broadcom wireless and Linux.

This is copied from the README file associated with the last link that frankbell posted, hopefully it clears things up. If you need help figuring out where the menus are or how to get to the shell and execute commands, let us know. Good luck!

Ubuntu:
------
Go to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
Choose the Broadcom STA wireless driver
Activate

Sometimes the driver does not show up in the Hardware Drivers choices. In
this case, try reintalling the driver from the GUI or shell like this:

From the GUI:
Package Manager (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager). Click the
Reload button in the upper left corner of Synaptic to refresh your index then
search for and reinstall the package named bcmwl-kernel-source.

From the shell:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source

In either GUI or text case, after reinstalling, reboot your machine.

Now go back to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
and you should see the driver enabled and working.

Ok, I went to syatem.Administration.Hardware Drivers....but there is no "hardware Drivers" there, just "Additional Hardware Drivers, which I need to be online for access.

GUI, to Synaptic Package manager, when I click reload I get a message that I am not online,

Shell...apt-get-update, again, not online.

This is a dual boot, with Win 7 and on my Win 7 drivers, I have a Broadcom440x10/100 Integrated Controller.

????

If you have home internet, you likely have a router. Even if it's called a "wireless" router, it should have ethernet ports in it. Mine has four ports.

Get an ethernet cable and move your computer to a spot close enough to the router the jack into it long enough to fix this problem.

A couple of ways you can do this. As frankbell posted, get an Ethernet cable and set up your hardwired connection from your Linux installation; then use Synaptic to get the package from the online repository. This would be the preferred way since you won't have to compile the driver yourself.

-or-

Download to Windows. Put it on a USB stick/drive and boot into Linux to copy it onto your Linux partition. Alternatively, you can mount your Windows partition and copy it to your Linux installation that way. Then unzip the contents and follow the instructions in the README file to compile and insert the module into your kernel.

I loaded Mint 9 instead and downloaded the broadband drivers immediately, and it works fine. I am on Mint 9 right now, and now have a triple boot pc, with about 113gb for each, Win7, Ubuntu10.1 and Mint9.
Mint 9 works just fine, all I need now is to download the codecs.
I will try to hook this up to a hardwire this week, then go to synaptics and see if I can't get Ubuntu10.10 up and running.
These are the types of problems that drive newbies away from Linux, and as a newbie, I find a lot of answers confusing...however, being totally disgusted with Microsoft and their attitude towards users, I will persevere.
thank you all. going to buy a ethernet cable, and we'll see what happens.

Ubuntu is up and running. The eternet cable was the trick. Thank all!