I recently installed Ubuntu on an old Dell Laptop using (CD media)
but I found that I no longer had a wireless network. So
I cannot connect to my netgear router at home and the internet rendering the installation virtually useless.

Dear steve.bradshaw,
what is the ouput of ifconfig
Faithfully,
M.

Can you give us a bit of detail about what exactly you are doing to get connected and what responses you are receiving from Ubuntu. Are you using Ubuntu 14.04 or some other version?
jdk

Hi Steve,

Welcome to LinuxQuestions!

You need to give us some more details to get help. What exactly is the model of Dell, laptop? Can you look up the spec and find out what WiFi network card is installed in it and let us know? If you can find them, details of the WiFi chip would help as well. ( No Internet connection... Yeh, I know... Read on...)

You're probably going to need to install a software module to enable the WiFi so the other thing you'll need is a Cat5 network patch cable to connect between your netgear router and the laptop to give you a connection to the Internet to allow you to check specs and download the correct module. Wired connections just seem to work!
Every time I've upgraded the OS on my old EeePC netbook it loses it's WiFi and I have to re-load the Realtech module this way to get it back.

Play Bonny!

Would it happen to be a Latitude C840 by any chance (or one from that era)? There is a notorious issue with those and Linux that affects wireless (no matter what chip you have) and the GeForce 4 graphics card. I think it's with the motherboard, I can't seem to get things that **should** work to work. I'm not alone:
http://www.liquidsilver.org/2010/03/...er-linux-fail/
He said in there that it's an issue with the GPU, but I think it's much deeper than that because of the wireless issue.

This link may be helpful:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/55868...reless-drivers

This topic seems to come up pretty often. Good luck.

Added: Ubuntu manual free download: http://ubuntu-manual.org/

See pp 77-78 for getting proprietary drivers, which would include drivers for Broadcom wifi. By the way, a wired internet connection is required for getting proprietary drivers.

Hi Steve...

Welcome to the forum

Let's first ascertain which wireless adapter we're dealing with.

Please open a terminal and post the results of...

Thanks!

1 members found this post helpful.

The key to this is finding out what wireless chipset is in use. Dell likes Broadcom, though I can't speak about that particular machine.

This thread will give you the tools to find out your wireless chipset and some assistance if it's Broadcom. Note that, in newer versions of Ubuntu, the location of the "Additional Drivers" item has moved; it's now a tab in the Software and Updates tool.

1 members found this post helpful.