wireless on Dell inspiron 1501

[Mr. PC]

I can't get my wireless to work at all. I can't figure out how to install Ndisrwrapper for the life of me and I'm not even sure if that's the proper solution. I'm the type of person who needs instructions one click at a time; I've read tons of instructions even the ones designed for total newbies but newbie seems to mean something different in the Unix world than it did in Windows.

Please please please please I'm so hopeless nothing woks !(

[bbfuller]

Hello Mr. PC

We'll probably need to try and see if we can find a little more detail about your wireless card first. Open a terminal window, in Gnome that is from the 'Applications Menu - System Tools', and in it either type what is below, or copy and paste it:

/sbin/lspci

The 'lspci' part of the command lists all pci devices and the '/sbin/' part is the path to the command.

You should see a scrollable list of information on your pci devices.

Look for the ones that mention 'ethernet controller' or 'network controller'. Copy and paste those back and we'll think about the next step.

[Linesma]

I feel your pain Mr. PC. Being new to Linux myself, I sometimes think that the instructions given, even for new users, requires some form of prior knowledge. I had the same problem with my Dell Inspiron E1505, and the following thread helped me out.

Ndiswrapper in F8

For it to work, you will need the driver for your wireless card. Do you know what card you have? If you let me know, and I will give you a link to the proper driver. The one packaged with your Laptop from Dell is in a Self-Installing zip file, and probably old.

Let me know.

Mark

[Bslagowski]

Using ndiswrapper for your system is probably not the best solution. It's most likely you have a Broadcom card supported by a native driver. Proceed as bbfuller suggested for now, at least. Ndiswrapper is a last ditch alternative.

[Mr. PC]

Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)

ya it is a Broadcom cool. I read that native drivers are really slow with dell cards but I'm not sure if that's true with mine.

[Bslagowski]

That's your wired control. Do:

su - 
lspci | grep Network

and paste that here.

[Mr. PC]

-v Be verbose
-n Show numeric ID's
-nn Show both textual and numeric ID's (names & numbers)
-b Bus-centric view (PCI addresses and IRQ's instead of those seen by the CPU)
-x Show hex-dump of the standard portion of config space
-xxx Show hex-dump of the whole config space (dangerous; root only)
-xxxx Show hex-dump of the 4096-byte extended config space (root only)
-s [[[[<domain>]:]<bus>]:][<slot>][.[<func>]] Show only devices in selected slots
-d [<vendor>]:[<device>] Show only selected devices
-t Show bus tree
-m Produce machine-readable output
-i <file> Use specified ID database instead of /usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids.gz
-k Show kernel drivers handling each device
-p <file> Look up kernel modules in a given file instead of default modules.pcimap
-D Always show domain numbers
-M Enable `bus mapping' mode (dangerous; root only)
-P <dir> Use specified directory instead of /proc/bus/pci
-H <mode> Use direct hardware access (<mode> = 1 or 2)
-F <file> Read configuration data from given file
-G Enable PCI access debugging