Dell Wireless 1500 / Broadcom 4328...almost there

spaceballs · 02-21-2007, 04:47 PM

I think that I am nearly here with this one. I am on a Dell XPS M1210 with a Dell Wireless 1500 wifi card. I downloaded the proper driver, and I got it to load up fine with:

Code:

ndiswrapper -i [path]bcmwl5.inf

It listed just fine when I

Code:

ndiswrapper -l

and -m

My wireless monitor is working, but I can't quite seem to grab an IP. iwconfig brings up the wlan0 interface. I have run

Code:

modprobe ndiswrapper

and it shows up in lsmod. When I go to KDE's Control Center / Network Settings, it shows the wlan0 interface as disabled. When I try and enable it, I get the following error message:

Quote:

There was an error changing the device's state. You will have to do it manually.

How do I do that? I think that I might have missed some small or minor detail. I have added modprobe ndiswrapper to my rc.local. Where did I make my mistake?

spaceballs · 02-21-2007, 11:05 PM

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 up

seems to be enabling and disabling the connection. I am on dial-up at the house [grrrr], but as soon as I am near a real connection I will verify this. It is odd, as iwconfig had seemed to be taking care of most everything else.

Hangdog42 · 02-22-2007, 06:42 AM

The one bit that is missing is configuring the card. Have you used iwconfig to set the ssid and encryption key if you use one? Also, how are you trying to get an IP address, static or DHCP?

Posting the outputs of iwconfig and ifconfig (but mostly iwconfig) should help us figure out where its going wrong.

spaceballs · 02-22-2007, 03:25 PM

Sorry about the wait:

Code:

root@StrangeLoop:/mnt/flash# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
          Bit Rate=130 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm
          RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr=2346 B
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

This is after I have run

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 up

I guess that what I want is for my machine to find a wireless network and to try and draw an IP dynamically. Does it work this way? This is my first experience with wireless...

Hangdog42 · 02-22-2007, 04:10 PM

Quote:

I guess that what I want is for my machine to find a wireless network and to try and draw an IP dynamically. Does it work this way? This is my first experience with wireless...

Not quite, your missing a step. You have to load the driver, configure the card so it associates with the accdess point and THEN you can request an IP.

Quote:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID

ff/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated

Here is the problem. You don't have an ESSID set and you haven't associated. You use the iwconfig command to set the SSID:

iwconfig wlan0 ssid YourSSID

You need to run that as root. Once you've done that, you should see the ESSID field now contains the SSID and the Access Point field should have a MAC address if it is associated. If you see both of those, then run dhcpcd wlan0 and that should request an IP address. If that is successful, you'll see that IP address in the output of ifconfig.

One bit we haven't talked about is encryption. If you have it on, temporarily turn it off and just test if you can configure the card and get an IP address. If that works, using encryption works one of two ways. If you use WEP, you use the iwconfig command to set the key:

iwconfig wlan0 key WEPKeyInHex

If you use WPA encryption (which is a much better choice) You'll need to run wpa_supplicant. There is a section of my website that discusses how to configure and use it. Slackware has a wpa_supplicant package that works nicely. You can find it in extras.

spaceballs · 02-22-2007, 09:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hangdog42

If you see both of those, then run dhcpcd wlan0 and that should request an IP address. If that is successful, you'll see that IP address in the output of ifconfig.

I was at this point earlier. I had affiliated with an access point and I had a MAC in there. When I ran dhcpd wlan0, it said that wlan0 could not be found. Even though I could see it in ifconfig and iwconfig. Does dhcpd require any special configuration? What is the difference between running dhcpd wlan0 and dhclient wlan0?

Hangdog42 · 02-23-2007, 06:46 AM

We may have a simple syntax problem here. Note the difference between what you ran:

dhcpd wlan0

And what I suggested you run:

dhcpcd wlan0

Note that extra c? Dhcpcd is a DHCP client, where dhcpd is a DHCP server and that could account for what you are seeing. This is one of those things that trips up lots of people, including me.

If I'm wrong and you were using dhcpcd, then you'll need to go through your log files and see if ndiswrapper or dhcpcd are complaining about anything.

spaceballs · 02-23-2007, 10:33 PM

You got it. That was it. Works fine now!

Gina · 05-12-2007, 04:32 PM

This is a message for spaceballs;
I am glad to see you got the wireless n working with your dell xps 1210! I am considering buying a dell xps 1210 & when I do a forum search in LQ, your name comes up the most so I am guessing that you know the most about that particular hardware ;-)
Can you just tell me: are you happy with the xps 1210 choice? I will probably load it with kubuntu (or maybe mandriva). Were you able to get most aspects working in linux?

TIA,
gina