No WiFi, No Touchpad, and more! - Dell XPS M1530 Ubuntu Hardy Heron
 

Hello all. I've just installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron and done the updates available as of this moment.

I haven't tried very hard yet, I admit, but my web searching has not revealed any answers that work for me.

I have no Wifi, no touchpad, no fingerprint reader... I'm sure there are other things that don't work but I haven't found them yet.

Does anyone else have these problems? Has anyone found a fix yet?

Thanks in advance.

I saved my dmesg output here: http://www.eanbowman.com/download/errors.txt
Here's my lspci output: http://www.eanbowman.com/download/lspci.txt

Pretty much the same with any other hardware issue. Your profile lists three other distros. Do these things work in them? If you're experienced in all of those distros you should know how to install drivers and configure the hardware.

Your wifi card is a Broadcom card so you'll have to install the firmware for the native driver using fwcutter or use ndiswrapper.

Touchpad is configured in xorg.conf just as is any other mouse. You may need to install the synaptics driver.

Everything is much the same. Find and install any missing drivers, and configure the hardware.

Experienced but not an expert
 

Thanks for that, yes I've done a quick search for solutions because I don't want to do something that screws up my install in the future when upgrades happen.

My experience with getting my hands into config files in Ubuntu hasn't been great. The upgrades seem to plow over any changes, so you need to remember to make a backup and restore it all the time. >_>

I was hoping things would "just work" but if I have to hack at it to get it working I suppose I can...

EPIC FAIL

1. The BCMWL43 isn't supported by default in my distro? What?
2. Synaptics driver is installed. The strangeness now is that it runs incredibly slowly but if I plug in my USB laser mouse it runs normal speed. If I turn the settings up to max it still tracks slowly. >_>
3. I installed the fingerprint reader software. Now I just have to find time between work, school and friends to actually screw around with my comptuer to get things to work... YAY!

:C

Synaptic Touchpad
 

Check this post I just made. The Touchpad would go from frantic to slow between reboots. I added a kernel option to grub, as recommended by other posts, and it solved the problem for me. Let me know your results.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=918520

dangerboy, you rock.

That fixed one problem completely. :D

The only problem was that after doing a soft reboot instead of powering off - I had no keyboard! XD

Hard rebooting fixed that.

Glad to be of service. I'm sure someone in the Ubuntu forums is having similar issues with their Broadcom wireless. I haven't done any searches on the topic, but if I find anything I will post it here. Likewise, I would recommend that you give the Ubuntu forums a thorough "once-over" on the topic. My m1530 came with an Intel Wireless adaptor, so Ubuntu just worked on it. Also, if you can get a wired connection, I recommend getting all the supported updates. The newer kernels might support your wireless adaptor.

Yes, I was hoping that updates might take care of things but they didn't completely.

My WiFi adapter is probably too new as it's an a/b/g/n model Broadcom adaptor.

I have downloaded fwcutter and it says it successfully cut the bcmwl6 driver from the Vista 32 bit drivers for it.

I still don't get the adapter appearing as a new networking device under networking or in the network manager icon.

Is there something I'm missing or is that an indication it's just not working?

I found a sticky on the topic. Have you tried this?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...wireless+m1530

For Bradcom 4328, try the drivers posted here with Ndiswrapper and this tutorial

I have this same Bradcom chipset running on an 64-bit OS, but it sometimes takes some retries to connect (it connects but fails at the dhcp stage, but I'm running Arch).

For the touchpad, I use Synaptics and worked without problems.

Well I used a Dell driver in a post on the Ubuntu forums and the device finally works but it can't connecte to the WPA1 Personal TKIP network here.

Do you have any tips for getting that to work? :|

I saw something on the Ubuntu forums about this I'll try later. I'll keep this thread updated.

Well, since I never used Ubuntu, I don't know. Maybe look for a network manager already installed, you should be able to configure a profile from there...

Thanks anyway.

No, the WiFi adaptor appears in the Network Manager and tries to connect but continuously asks me for the password, which is entered correctly.

It seems to just not want to connect. Vista does it fine.

Have you configured wpa_supplicant?

I've seen some reports that NetworkManager in Ubuntu is broken, particularly with respect to WPA encrypted access points. You might try replacing NetworkManager with wicd and see if that can do the job. I also experienced something similar when I installed Hardy on a friends laptop. NetworkManager wouldn't connect to my WPA network, but wicd picked it right up.

Thanks for the suggestion. In my case networkmanager isn't the issue.

After much searching I've finally solved my WiFi issues by following this short tutorial: http://hasin.wordpress.com/2008/02/2...on-ubuntu-710/

The driver it links to actually works.

I think in the process of trying other things I might have fudged my settings somehow but with a fresh install after trying that tutorial and adding the required line to my menu.lst file to make the trackpad work, I'm happy.

If I never use the fingerprint reader in Linux, I won't feel bad.

Thanks again everyone! You were all a big help.