I have the exact same card and have it working perfectly in slackware 10.2. The driver file that you need is bcmwl5.inf. Don't use the one that comes on the CD (this isn't a problem since you haven't even found it yet), but use the one supplied by Dell. Here's a link:
http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R81433.EXE
Just unzip that. I think the regular unzip program will work even though it is an EXE file.
Actually, before you use that driver, you need to properly install ndiswrapper. It might work by "tar -zxvf ndiswrapper.tar.gz" and using "make" and "make install" in the ndiswrapper directory, but chances are it won't. Like he said, check out the ndiswrapper forums and wiki.
Once you have ndiswrapper installed, make sure you DO actually have the same wireless card as me. Just do
Code:
lspci | grep Broadcom
and see if it gives you "Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)".
If it is indeed the same one (or possibly one similar to it), find the INF file you just unzipped and run
Code:
ndiswrapper -i (PATH-TO-INF-FILE)
ndiswrapper -l
this should get you "bcmwl5 - driver present, hardware present". At this point you need to add the module to the kernel with
Code:
modprobe ndiswrapper
You should NOT get feedback from this. If you do get a bunch of error messages, you either didn't compile ndiswrapper correctly or something else has gone wrong.
If you did indeed download, extract, and install the driver and loaded the module correctly, you are ready to begin configuring your network. Type in "iwconfig" and see what it gives you. You should get several device names with "No wireless extentions" and one (probably wlan0) that has a lot of info. The one with lots of info is your wireless device. Remember it's name. Now, assuming you have your wireless router already set up, type in
Code:
iwlist (DEVICE-NAME) scan
You might want to pipe (|) that into "more" or "less" if it fills up your screen with info. Find the "cell" with your ESSID that you want to use. Check to see if it has encryption. If it does you may have problems. (I can't get mine to work with encryption at least. Maybe somebody else can help you with that.) Now simply type in
Code:
iwconfig (DEVICE-NAME) essid (ESSID-NAME)
You might want to try that a couple times, just to make sure it does it. Now test to see if it is working by typing
Code:
iwconfig (DEVICE-NAME)
Check to see if the ESSID field gives you what you want, not "off/any". If it says "off/any" or isn't working, it can't connect to the router due to some security measure or just due to bad signal.
Now your wireless modem is set up and it has to be configured like any other NIC. "dhcpcd (DEVICE-NAME)" should work, but you might want to do some manual "ifconfig" and "route" stuff.
Just say so if anything goes wrong. Hope that helps!
