Hi,
Second time i decided to change my life style. I think every body who depend on the computer have a really good reason to choose linux. Well the thing i have a laptop dell latitude d610 and i installed ubuntu 8.1 but i cant connect to the wi fi internet connection i have, and i don't really know how this work's do i have to install the drivers like window too or it's different?

can somebody help me?

So far it's the only thing i'm missing.

Anyway thanks to every body who work for linux. I have installed in a virtual disc in a macbook pro and it's really nice. Im just hating windows more every day...

Thanks

Welcome to LQ!!

Open a terminal and enter "sudo ifconfig -a". We're looking for two devices named eth0, wlan0,or maybe eth1 . A typical system would have the wired connection (Ethernet) on eth0 and the wireless on wlan0. If you find both devices, then it means the necessary driver is already there. Next, try "iwlist wlan0 scan". (Assuming that wlan0 is the wireless device) This will tell us if you are able to see any access points (including yours).

If the wireless device does NOT show up with ifconfig, then look for it using "dmesg" and "lspci".


(For most--or all--of the commands, you need "sudo" at the beginning.)

Alternatively, have you tried configuring and connecting using the GUI network manager? (eg WICD) What results did you get?

First of all you have to figure out what brand your wireless card is, open a terminal and type lspci this will give a listing of your video/usb/network/wireless cards in the laptop. You may see something like"broadcom " or "intel pro/wireless, copy and paste it here so we can look at it and figure out your wireless card make.
Getting them to work is fairly simple once you know what card you have.Dell is very linux friendly and I have installed Debian on 5 laptops so far and currently own an inspiron 700 and a latitude D820, wireless with both work better under linux than with windows!
With the newer kernels a lot of the drivers are already there you just have to download and install the firmware.

One of the reasons I use Sabayon and Puppy is that they both work great with my hardware, including wireless cards. Of course someone smart could get Ubuntu to work but I'm lazy and don't see a need to struggle with Ubuntu when Sabayon and Puppy work perfectly out of the box (with my particular hardware).

My advice is to try other distros. If you like Ubuntu, try Kubuntu which is Ubuntu with a KDE desktop instead of Gnome. KDE has a nice wireless manager that is easy to use.

from sudo lspci i got this

ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (REV 01)

Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [Airforce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless Lan controller (rev 02)

The Broadcom 4300 series is the same type Ive got. Never did get it working with Ubuntu but admittedly didn't try very hard since it works fine with Sabayon.

It will be interesting to see what it takes to get it running.

Just google for fwcutter. On their main site you'll find listed all the Broadcom cards their driver works with. If and only if your card is not among the ones listed, you will have to use ndiswrapper. Neither is particularly hard to install, and there are helpful posts for both on the Internet.

The good news is that you wireless card is supported and the drivers are included in the Debian kernel you now need to install the firmware! Go to your package manager (synaptic) and download/install bcm43xx-fwcutter .
When it asks you if you want to install firmware say yes! You should also have your kernel headers installed too.(if not do it first).When it's done
go to System > Administration > Network find your card, set up your properties for your network and it should all work!