Hi, I am having some problems with getting my wireless card to work.

I am using the following card: dell wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI Card

on a Dell Inspiron 1300 running Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

I transfered the windows drivers (Broadcom chipset) to Linux, installed ndiswrapper and then tried to set up the card. Here is my shell output from the installation process:-

sudo /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i /usr/local/wlan_1370/DRIVER/bcmwl5.inf
bcmwl5 is already installed. Use -e to remove it

root:~# /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present

root:~# /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m
modprobe config already contains alias directive

root:~# /sbin/depmod -a
root:~# modprobe ndiswrapper
root:~# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:"default" Nickname:"Broadcom 4318"
Mode:Managed Access Point: Invalid Bit Rate=1 Mb/s
RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption key:BA00-3000-00 Security modepen
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

sit0 no wireless extensions.

root:~# dmesg | grep ndiswrapper
[17179594.580000] ndiswrapper version 1.8 loaded (preempt=yes,smp=no)
root:~# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:22:A0:F4:F5
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:217

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:7 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:372 (372.0 b) TX bytes:372 (372.0 b)

root:~# modprobe ndiswrapper
root:~# ndiswrapper -m
modprobe config already contains alias directive

When I try to activate the card and connect I get the following error:

SIOCGIFFLAGS error: No such device

Any help would be great. Thankyou in advance.

Will103

Do you have the relevant firmware installed for the version of ndiswrapper that you are using.

Hi, I have no idea - so its likely that that may be part (or all) of the problem. I will have another search around on the forums.

Thanks for the advice.

will103

You seem to have a functional wireless card on eth1, is that not the one you're trying to use?

Could you be a bit more specific about the commands you're using here? Also, what kernel are you using? If it is one of the newer kernels, there is a chance that the native linux Broadcom driver, bcm43xx, is being used. Have a look at the output of lsmod to see. If it is there you need to choose either that or ndiswrapper since they will conflict with each other.

Hi,
Some time ago I was using the ipw2200 linux driver which definately requires firmware and confused the two.
Specific firmware is not required for ndiswrapper. I do apologise.
I did install ndiswrapper for a friend over the weekend - a broadcom chipset.
Your iwconfig confirms that ndiswrapper is working correctly and that your card is alive.
Keeping in mind the post from hangdog42, you only need to assign an IP address and a gateway, if required, or do;
dhcpcd wlan0 to assign dhcp.
You can prevent conflicting kernel modules from loading in your init scripts, or blacklist them. Otherwise, unset them in your kernel config and recompile.
Slackware is easy in this respect, but I don't have a lot of experience with Debian. Someone else could help you there.

Hi thanks for you replies, and sorry for not replying sooner. Unfortunately I have somehow managed to lose the ethernet connection as well now (Eth0). I am not sure what I have done but I am going to have to reconfigure the networking completely.


Thanks, will103

For what its worth, I was troubleshooting with a friend yesterday, and when he made some changes, and restarted his X server, his eth0 went down. He said it happens every now and again, and he got it working again right away by doing " ifup eth1 " because he said, it switches back and forth between eth0 and eth1, he does not know why -- but he is in Debian testing, if that makes a difference..

Good luck!

Hi everyone,

An update - I looked around the forums again (here and at Ubuntu) and found a shell script that one of the Ubuntu crowd had prepared. It basically automates the process of installing and configuring ndiswrapper. This still didn't work for me but the author provided a short troubleshooting section and I tried out his suggestions.

In the terminal I entered "dhclient" as root, and I suddenly had a connection. I can't believe how long it has taken me to figure this out. My own fault for not taking the time to research it properly.

Thanks for all of your suggestions.

Will103

Could you get me the information where you got this shell script and troubleshooting information? I could also use this as I am having the same problems getting my Dell wireless 1370 card working.