Dell Latitude D610 - FN+F2 will not enable wireless - help!

[travlemon]

Hey everybody,

I was just recently given a Dell Latitude D610 from someone who didn't want it. It came with Windows XP Pro on it, and I logged in real quick to check things out. Wireless was working as it should and the FN + F2 key combination was enabling/disabling the wireless card as it is supposed to.

Installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 10.04 and wiped the entire disk to use with Ubuntu. Upon setting everything up, I installed ndiswrapper and installed the driver for this laptop's wireless card. I am familiar with ndiswrapper and have used it many times, so I know my workflow with that was correct.

After installing the driver, I couldn't find the device anywhere in network manager. I noticed the WiFi light is not turned on, and thus probably the root of my problem here. I tried pressing FN + F2 (the wireless enable/disable key combo for this model laptop), and I get no response. The light WiFi light does not come on. I've seen on other forums that the light may not come on, but wireless may still be enabled.

I've double checked so many things, but the system just doesn't seem to want to enable this device. In the long run, it seems as though this is not a driver issue, but just a matter of getting the darn wireless card to enable, so the system can recognize it.

Does anyone know how to address this? I've googled my brains out and searched the forums, and the closest thing I've found was aircraft manager. However, another forum suggested that aircraft-manager is only for 2 specific Dell mini models, which may explain why it won't open for me.

Anyway, thank you in advance! Any suggestions are more than appreciated!

[niteshifter]

Hi,

Have you checked in the BIOS settings to see if wireless is enabled?

[travlemon]

Hi,

Have you checked in the BIOS settings to see if wireless is enabled?

Hi, thanks for responding. Yes, I have double checked many times in BIOS that wireless is enabled. And several times, I will save the settings and then re-enter BIOS to make sure they saved correctly.

[MartijnV]

Why are you using ndiswrapper drivers? What kind of wifi card do you have? My intel 2200BG card works "out of the box" And it was very easy to get my pc card with broadcom chipset working. No need of windows drivers. Maybe ndiswrapper is the cause?

[travlemon]

Why are you using ndiswrapper drivers? What kind of wifi card do you have? My intel 2200BG card works "out of the box" And it was very easy to get my pc card with broadcom chipset working. No need of windows drivers. Maybe ndiswrapper is the cause?

I am using ndiswrapper because the card wasn't working at all, out of the box. The card is a Dell Wireless 1350 WLAN PC Card. I will do another clean install of a Ubuntu, wiping everything. I will specifically pay attention to the wireless behavior this time, and see if it gets picked up. I have no data to lose, and the installation doesn't take long at all. I will let you know how that turns out.

[travlemon]

Why are you using ndiswrapper drivers? What kind of wifi card do you have? My intel 2200BG card works "out of the box" And it was very easy to get my pc card with broadcom chipset working. No need of windows drivers. Maybe ndiswrapper is the cause?

Ok, so I did another clean install of Ubuntu. Upon signing in, it shows no wireless devices. So I checked out the Hardware Drivers section to see if there were any drivers for it to be downloaded (I have it hard wired), and there are no drivers. I also doubled checked that the card is enabled in BIOS.

I am pretty much stumped on this. It just doesn't seem like the card wants to enable itself so the OS can pick it up :-\

[MartijnV]

weird. According to google it has the broadcom BC4306sg chipset. It should work with the b43 driver? (fwcutter) But then you should have seen it in the "drivers" program. (i don't know the exact name in English, it's the same way you, for instance, would install the proprietary nvidia drivers)

What can you see in the logs? (messages in logviewer?)

[travlemon]

weird. According to google it has the broadcom BC4306sg chipset. It should work with the b43 driver? (fwcutter) But then you should have seen it in the "drivers" program. (i don't know the exact name in English, it's the same way you, for instance, would install the proprietary nvidia drivers)

What can you see in the logs? (messages in logviewer?)

Hmm, there looks to be a ton of things in the messages section. What exactly should I be looking for? It looks like a list of many things it detected, and other various hardware info.

[travlemon]

weird. According to google it has the broadcom BC4306sg chipset. It should work with the b43 driver? (fwcutter) But then you should have seen it in the "drivers" program. (i don't know the exact name in English, it's the same way you, for instance, would install the proprietary nvidia drivers)

What can you see in the logs? (messages in logviewer?)

Also, I forgot to mention that if I search "latitude" in the Synaptic Package Manager, it finds something called "i8kutils". It looks like it's geared towards making the FN key functions work properly on dell models. I installed the package, but I have no clue how to use it. Do you know anything about it?

[MartijnV]

Things like your wifi card being detected, detecting the broadcom chipset, requesting the firmware (and maybe not finding the firmware)
when i look at "dmesg" i find things like this for my intel card

ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
[   21.697014] ipw2200 0000:02:06.0: firmware: requesting ipw2200-bss.fw

I only use the i8k utils to display the temperatures in the gnome hardware sensors applet.

HOWTO: Install and configure i8kmon for configurable automatic fan speed control


(good luck, i'm going to sleep, shutdown-h now)