Dell 1395 (Broadcom 4315), ndiswrapper and Gutsy - success!

[elektropod]

There have been a couple of threads that touched on some of these elements, but nothing that gave a complete walkthrough, so here it is. I have a Dell Vostro 1500 with the Dell TrueMobile 1395 wireless card, one that has given many Linux users big headaches.

After trying many different approaches suggested all over the web, and gathering clues in many Ubuntu forum posts, I finally worked out this solution:

1. blacklist bcm43xx

echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

2. install ndiswrapper and related files

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndisgtk

(this should also pull in the 'utils' package)
when I was all said and done, I had
ndiswrapper 1.45
ndiswrapper-utils 1.9
ndisgtk (you don't really need this, and my instructions don't make use of it)

3. download and extract http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe

this is a ridiculous bit of bloat, but the most complete INF for 43xx devices

4. go into folder DRIVER_US inside the result of what you did above

5. use ndiswrapper to install bcmwl5.inf

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m (this one will give you a bunch of warnings - ignore)
sudo ndiswrapper -ma
sudo ndiswrapper -mi

(I don't honestly know if the last three steps are necessary, but can't hurt)

6. reboot your machine

After I did the above and rebooted, the little blue Wi-Fi light on the right side of my Vostro came on, and it grabbed an IP via DHCP without any additional fuss.

[Mizai]

Thanks for this. Just bought a Dell Inspiron 1720 with the same card, and after hours of struggle, these instructions worked perfectly.

[JayBachatero]

Man you don't know how much I love you right now. I tried everything trying to get wireless to work with this laptop. After a few days I gave up and sticked with Vista. I did a search today and came across this. You just made my day. THANKS.

[elaurent]

Thanks a lot! I have been struggling with my new inspiron 1720 T8100 and gutsy for hours before I found your post.
I had followed almost the same procedure but was using driver bcmwl6 delivered with my laptop instead of the one you pointed to...
After being able to activate the wlan0 card I faced the following problem:
It seems impossible to enter a 128 bit WEP key with the gnome network settings (max number of characters in the caption windows for the key?).
I had to use KDE interface to enter my key and now every thing works fine.

thanks again.

[ubonetu]

Wow,

I've been looking for an answer to this problem for days. BTW it works on the Inspiron 1521 in Fedora as well. Trick is, you have to use the driver you suggested and not the current one: bcmwl6.inf = bad.

Thanks so much,

ubonetu <-- Three cools for you, Sir.

[swat253]

I'm having the same problem with a BCM43xx card. Problem is, I have no clue as to what the original poste, and the following success story posters, did to make theirs work!

Could someone dumb this down for me a bit?

Are the following commands being entered on a terminal screen after, in my case, "swa@swa-laptop: - $" ?

1. blacklist bcm43xx echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist 2. install ndiswrapper and related files sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndisgtk (this should also pull in the 'utils' package) when I was all said and done, I had ndiswrapper 1.45 ndiswrapper-utils 1.9 ndisgtk (you don't really need this, and my instructions don't make use of it) 3. download and extract http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe this is a ridiculous bit of bloat, but the most complete INF for 43xx devices 4. go into folder DRIVER_US inside the result of what you did above 5. use ndiswrapper to install bcmwl5.inf sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf sudo ndiswrapper -m (this one will give you a bunch of warnings - ignore) sudo ndiswrapper -ma sudo ndiswrapper -mi

Thanks! I'd really like to get Ubuntu 7.10 hooked up to the net so I can update and add-on a few packages!

[swat253]

I'm getting this response;
[B]
tee: /: Is a directory
tee: etc/modprobe.d/blacklist: No such file or directory

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ______________________________________

Somehow worked thru all that and now stuck at step 5;

"Package ndiswrapper-utils is not available, but is referred to by another package." ????

[swat253]

SUCCESS!

I was having problems with the last step of the workaround (my attempts wouldn't locate the utils files) so I tried another route.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ht=ndiswrapper

The link above proved to work for a Linux/Ubuntu noob like myself! No disrespect whatsoever for the original instructions; I've never dealt with typing commands in terminals, so I'm sure it was on my end.

In any case, anyone else having problems with a Broadcom wireless card should have at look at the link.

[ubonetu]

I gotta say, on like three different os's this has worked.... bravo.

Ward

[ReddogOne]

So many thank owed to you.

Only thing is...

Originally Posted by elektropod 3. download and extract http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe

How would you extract this? I used wine (as a guest) and it worked but not sure this is the easiest!