SuSE 10.2 and ndiswrapper for Dell 1390 Wireless card

TheFnN3WGuy · 02-05-2007, 11:25 AM

Hello,
I followed This little "how to" on installing the Dell 1390 Wireless card drivers on SuSE 10.2. The only deviation that I made from this tutorial is using the correct drivers.

when I do an ndiswrapper -l I get this

Code:

bcmwl5          driver installed (alternate driver: bcm43xx)

The device doesn't show up in the Network Manager either...I'm looking for a little help...Any would be appreciated..

pnellesen · 02-05-2007, 01:01 PM

What does "dmesg" look like? Just out of curiosity, are you running 32 bit or 64?

TheFnN3WGuy · 02-06-2007, 12:34 AM

I am using the 32-bit distro and downloaded the appropriate drivers

dmesg output's the following (truncated to only show network interfaces). If you need more info, let me know...Thanks

Code:

eth0:  Tigon3 [partno(BCM5752KFBG) rev 6002 PHY(5752)] (PCI Express) 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet 00:15:c5:59:c4:af
eth0:  RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[1] MIirq[1] ASF[0] Split[0] WireSpeed[1] TSOcap[1]
eth0:  dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit] <--I don't get why this is 64-Bit

For what it's worth...I can't even get the OS to recognize that the wlan card is physically installed on the machine. I'm using a Dell Latitude D620 if that helps...

Thanks for the assistance..

Hangdog42 · 02-06-2007, 07:03 AM

I'm betting you've got two drivers competing for the card. A lot of the most recent versions of Linux distros now include the bcm43xx driver, and if that and ndiswrapper are loaded at the same time, you've got problems.

First off, post the output of lspci. Hopefully that will tell us what chipset you've got in that card. Depending on that answer, we can make a more intelligent choice about whether to use ndiswrapper or bcm43xx. However, if you just want to go with ndiswrapper, you'll need to blacklist the bcm43xx driver so it doesn't load. You do that by adding it to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file.

TheFnN3WGuy · 02-08-2007, 12:46 AM

lspci lists it as a Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 UART. I've got the light on the laptop to light up...And iwconfig lists all the extensions and all, but I just can't seem to get it to pick up a wireless network.

This is probably a bad presumption from a former Windows guy, but is there any type of notification that appears on the desktop when a wireless network is available or is there another command that I'm not aware of. Thanks for your help

Hangdog42 · 02-08-2007, 06:48 AM

OK, look in the output of lsmod. If you see bcm43xx in the list and ndiswrapper, the two of them are competing for your card and probably causing trouble. I would start by removing both modules:

modprobe -r ndiswrapper
modprobe -r bcm43xx

and then I would load just ndiswrapper

modprobe ndiswrapper

Hopefully that will allow you to configure and use the wirelss card. If that does the trick we can blacklist bcm43xx so it doesn't cause trouble in the future. In general, a native linux driver is a much better choice than ndiswrapper, but bcm43xx is kind of flaky, and I'm not sure how well it works with the 4310.

Quote:

This is probably a bad presumption from a former Windows guy, but is there any type of notification that appears on the desktop when a wireless network is available or is there another command that I'm not aware of.

I'm not sure there is anything as automatic as the Windows notification, but there are some apps that kind of do similar things. If you use KDE (or at least have it installed) kwifi seems to get a lot of attention. There is also wifi radar. Personally, I tend to do things in a console, so I tend to use the iwlist command (iwlist wlan0 scan). You might also want to investigate wpa_supplicant which has some capability to automatically connect to the strongest network available.

TheFnN3WGuy · 02-08-2007, 06:53 AM

Thanks for the help..I blacklisted the BCM43XX and that seemed to do the trick. I greatly appreciate your help with this. I am more into the terminal stuff that the GUI. What are some commands that I should know? Thanks again.

Hangdog42 · 02-08-2007, 07:08 AM

When it comes to wireless, there aren't many commands you really need to know. Obviously iwconfig comes in handy, and iwlist is good for finding access points. If you're interested, I've got a perl script on my help site that uses iwlist to scan for available access points and then presents a list to choose from. It's pretty simple, but it works for me.

You do probably want to investigate wpa_supplicant as it is a pretty good tool, particularly if you have several encrypted networks you use. I also find it useful for more general roaming.

Besides that you do need to understand the basic networking commands like ifconfig and route. You'll also need to be familiar with your dhcp client. I don't know which one Suse uses, but it could be dhclient or dhcpcd. Pump is another popular client, although it tends to be used largely via the ifup command (which is more of a script and not used by all distros). You also need to understand how to mess with your /etc/resolv.conf file. That becomes important if you ever need to set static IP addresses.

TheFnN3WGuy · 02-08-2007, 07:12 AM

Thanks for the input and all the help.

What would I use to connect to a Secure WLAN. I have the wpa_supplicant installed but can't really find anywhere that tells me exactly what it is

TheFnN3WGuy · 02-08-2007, 08:21 AM

I finally got this working...Thanks to all who helped.

I found This article which also was help along the way. I think between the information in this forum and the link provided, an abolute newbie to linux should be able to get this wireless card up and running in little time. After all, I did it with only about a weeks experience with linux.

Thanks again

Hangdog42 · 02-08-2007, 11:34 AM

If you need more help with wpa_supplicant, check out my help site (the link is in my sig). I've got a small section on wpa_supplicant with examples of the config file and the command I use to start it. Of course you can always ask more questions here.

Congrats on getting this working!