Hey guys, now I'm happy that my Slackware is finally up and running, but I have difficulty in enabling my wireless card on the dell laptop, does anyone know why? My laptop model is Dell Inspiron 1501. I really hope I'll spend most time on Linux by configuring everything successfully on Linux so I can hardly turn to Windows

I can't seem to find what kind of wireless card/chipset that particular model of laptop has ... I'm assuming it's built-in, right ?

If it is built-in and using a PCI interface, then it should be listed when you run '/sbin/lspci -vv'.

What should I do after I found the model for this wireless card? Actually I can see it in the windows saying "Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-card"

Since you did not post the output of I can only guess at the chip. It looks as if that card of yours needs the ndiswrapper program (not part of Slackware) in order to work. Posting the lspci output may prove that there are better drivers than ndiswrapper.Ndiswrapepr makes use of the Windows NDIS driver and should be considered as a last resort in case there is no native Linux support.

Read through this page: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/...re:ndiswrapper and see if that helps you installing and configuring ndiswrapper on your computer.

Eric

Actually, I think ndiswrapper may be the only viable option at the moment:
http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php...le_ndiswrapper

Since they are broadcom based, it may theoretically be possible to use the 'bcm43xx' driver, but as seen here, the status is 'yellow':
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_p...brandname=Dell

Thank you very much for your instruction,seems Bob's walkthrough might work,but it seems quite long,guess I'll work on it later today to see if it's happy with it. It never occured to me that configuring wifi for Linux could be so troublesome

Hi,

Dell has several models in the 'Inspiron 1501' series. The 'Dell Inspiron 1501 [PP23LA]' use the 'Broadcom 440x' chipset. So I think it would be a problem using the 'bcm43xx' driver with this model.

The OP should post the model of the Inspiron he has. That way we could direct him better. I really think the OP will have to go the ndiswrapper route to get the wireless working.

Actually, they did post it and sure enough it is a 1501

I would say on the contrary... unless you compare it to the Windows world perhaps.
The problem with wireless is that the hardware vendors are very reluctant to offer decent drivers, or even hardware specifications, to the Linux community. The result is that Linux kernel support for wireless hardware lags behind, because often the driver has to be reverse engineered. Other drivers require binary proprietary (closed-source) firmware to be loaded on boot which may prevent a driver from being included into the mainline kernel.
And if all else fails, you need to use the Windows drivers for your card (because every vendor of wireless cards will make a Windows driver available) and the people that created NDISwrapper found how to use this Windows driver code inside the Linux kernel.

When you finally do have a driver for your wireless card, the rest is simple, and well-documented. No, there is no easy GUI for your configuration, but if you require that, then Slackware is not for you.

Common chipsets on the market that are well-supported by the kernel or external modules, are Intel Pro-Wireless, RaLink, Atheros.

Eric

Hi,

Yes, I looked at the earlier post. My bad! Brain infatuate error.

I did find out the the Inspiron 1501 uses the 'Broadcom 4401/B0' chipset.

Yeah, that happens a lot to me too, typically when I'm tired.

Hey,all,I checked the system again,now I can give a definite name of this chip"Broadcom Corporation BCM9431MCG wlan mini-PCI",now I'm on the windows driver installing step,hope it works.

This is sad,after I installed the windows driver and used lspci -n to check, all I got is to find out that it was installed on the ethernet card but not the wireless card? Anyone knows what's going on here? I totally followed that walkthrough.

no luck, I failed to enable the wireless card, and even more weird thing is I cannot disable my ethernet card.

Please read my post from this link:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...3/#post2947275
It will work for you!

Dan