I've made several attempts to get my Dell Truemobile 1150 to work for weeks now but it still doesn't work. I believe it uses the orinoco_cs driver. I don't know why but I can't get my laptop wireless client to work if I put in ANY wireless card. The necessary drivers and software should be installed. I'm using Slackware 10 with a full installation and a generic kernel. I'm still new to Linux so please help.

Look into an ndiswrapper or try out www.linuxant.com 's DriverLoader. Good luck.

But this is an older card. Linux is suppose to have support for this card. How am I suppose to get linuxant and ndiswrapper to work with a newer card, when I can't get a linux-compatible card to work with an old card?

If you can't get any wireless card to work in your laptop you may want to check if your PCMCIA service is running.

Well the "status" light is working on the card, so the pcmcia service is running.

cardctl ident displays my cards name, so it must have detected it, which also means that the pcmcia service is running.

From what I can tell, the 1150 is a re-badged ORiNOCO mini-PCI card so the orinoco driver should be fine.

* lsmod should show orinoco, orinoco-cs and hermes modules loaded.
* Some Dells boot with the radio disabled depending on the BIOS config. Fn-F2 toggles the wireless.
* What does iwconfig show?
* If your AP is set to disable SSID broadcast, enable it to see if that makes a difference.

It works! What I did was enabled my SSID broadcast on my AP. But doesn't this create a security risk. Why does my connection start working when I enabled this?

Some combinations of hardware and clients need to see the SSID beacon to latch onto the AP.

It's not a security risk. Why?

When your wireless is on, it can be seen. Period. There is no Klingon cloaking device for radio waves. Disabling the ESSID broadcast simply shuts off the beaconing of the network name.

This means that someone using an active scanning tool like NetStumbler may not see your AP. Someone with Kismet will, however, as it uses passive scanning. (Frankly, I'd be more worried about someone with Kismet than a kid with NS). Your AP will also respond with the ESSID when probed - by your laptop or another device. It has to by design.

So, IMHO (shared by some who I consider to be trustworthy), disabling the ESSID broadcast is a head-in-the-sand approach. Use WEP or WPA and change the WEP keys regularly.

Thanks for the information. I'll be playing around with it for a while.

One thing that I have noticed is when I boot up Linux, I can't get my wireless to work until I do a "cardctl eject" then a "cardctl insert" and then it works. I'm not sure why it does this. Does anyone know why?

Try entering all of the pertinent wireless stuff in /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf so that it comes up on boot. You might also need to load the drivers in /etc/modules.conf

Now it worked the first time when it booted. It must be the router. I'm getting a link quality of 26/92 at 30 feet away. It's like this with any software that I use. What kind of wireless routers do you guys use and how far do they work before the signal goes completely dead?