Hi everyone. First, let me say that I have decided to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and I love it! The only thing is that I am having problems configuring my Dell 1350 wireless card with Debian Etch. I am running a dell inspiron 1150. I installed the bcmwl5a.inf driver with ndiswrapper, it shows up with hardware present and all that fun stuff. When I configure it with DHCP in the Network Settings, then click ok, and activate, it says activating, and then after while says Could not enable the interface eth1 Check that the settings are correct for this network and that the computer is correctly connected to it. I'm sure that the settings are correct, and I have no idea why this isn't working. Can anyone help?

Thx, starwarsfan982

A couple of possibilities:

1) If your kernel is a stock kernel that is 2.6.17 or later, the bcm43xx module may be present. Have a look at the output of lsmod and see if it is listed. If so, bcm43xx and ndiswrapper cannot be loaded at the same time, you have to pick one or the other.

2) When you loaded bcmwl5a.inf, was the .sys file in the same location as the .inf?

There is a bcmwl5.sys file in the folder, but no bcmwl5a.sys

I did a lsmod but could not find bcm43xx. Here is the output, maybe there is something in here I missed. I also noticed that ndiswrapper isn't in there. Could that be the problem?

dylan:/etc/modprobe.d# lsmod
Module Size Used by
b44 22220 0
nls_iso8859_1 4224 1
isofs 32316 1
udf 72932 0
i915 16384 1
drm 61556 2 i915
ipv6 222304 10
ppdev 8516 0
parport_pc 32132 0
lp 10852 0
parport 33160 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp
button 6544 0
ac 4836 0
battery 9188 0
i8xx_tco 6968 0
dm_snapshot 16032 0
dm_mirror 18928 0
dm_mod 50424 2 dm_snapshot,dm_mirror
loop 14888 0
pcmcia 34012 0
firmware_class 9696 1 pcmcia
hw_random 5624 0
shpchp 34272 0
pci_hotplug 27196 1 shpchp
joydev 8992 0
mousedev 10788 1
tsdev 7392 0
yenta_socket 23884 1
rsrc_nonstatic 11968 1 yenta_socket
pcmcia_core 37300 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic
snd_intel8x0 30204 1
8250_pci 19840 0
snd_intel8x0m 15980 0
snd_ac97_codec 82720 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_intel8x0m
snd_ac97_bus 2368 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm_oss 35968 0
snd_mixer_oss 15872 1 snd_pcm_oss
psmouse 34600 0
snd_pcm 74532 4 snd_intel8x0,snd_intel8x0m,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 20836 1 snd_pcm
intel_agp 21116 1
agpgart 29864 3 drm,intel_agp
pcspkr 3040 0
serio_raw 6596 0
evdev 9088 2
rtc 12340 0
snd 48100 9 snd_intel8x0,snd_intel8x0m,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore 9216 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 9512 3 snd_intel8x0,snd_intel8x0m,snd_pcm
ext3 118568 2
jbd 50292 1 ext3
mbcache 8324 1 ext3
sd_mod 18592 3
ide_generic 1376 0 [permanent]
usbhid 36704 0
usb_storage 70560 2
scsi_mod 123080 2 sd_mod,usb_storage
ide_cd 35680 1
ide_disk 15072 3
cdrom 32448 1 ide_cd
ehci_hcd 28040 0
uhci_hcd 20424 0
piix 9476 0 [permanent]
generic 4420 0 [permanent]
ide_core 111016 6 ide_generic,usb_storage,ide_cd,ide_disk,piix,generic
usbcore 111616 5 usbhid,usb_storage,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd
mii 5312 1 b44
thermal 12904 0
processor 25512 1 thermal
fan 4516 0

Yeah, that is likely it. You load the ndiswrapper module with the modprobe command:

modprobe ndiswrapper

That should get it to show up in lsmod, and then you should be good to go with configuration and getting an IP address.

Ok, now when I run modprobe ndiswrapper as root it gives me the following error:

FATAL: Error inserting ndiswrapper (/lib/modules/2.6.17-2-686/misc/lib/modules/2.6.17-2-686/misc/ndiswrapper.ko): Invalid argument

This seems to have something to do with the kernel so I'm going to install the headers and see if that fixes the problem. Please Help me!

Yeah, for ndiswrapper to compile you need the kernel source code installed and the headers probably won't hurt. You'll probably need to recompile ndiswrapper once you've got those installed.

By the way you haven't said how you're installing ndiswrapper so here is a bit of unsolicited advice: do NOT use a pre-compiled nidswrapper package. Ndiswrapper really needs to be compilied again your running kernel so unless the package matches your kernel exactly you are going to have troubles.

Besides, ndiswrapper is drop-dead easy to install from source.

Oops. I checked the drivers and realized I must have uninstalled them. So after I installed them, I modprobed ndiswrapper, and then ran lsmod. Ndiswrapper showed up, and magically out of nowhere, so did bcmw43xx. So then I ran rmmod bcmw43xx, and now when I go into the Networking section, eth1 or wlan0 doesn't show up. I'm going to try and restart and see if that fixes it.

Ok everything's all sorted out now. Turns out my wireless card was turned off. I turned is back on in xp, and now I can consider Debian better than ubuntu. Thankyou so much for your help,

Starwarsfan982