Dell 1390 Wireless Card not detected
Posts: 5
Well, I've given it all I can put towards this, and here's my problem.
I have a Dell Insipron E1505 notebook with a Dell 1390 Wireless LAN adapter, and I've been battling it for some time now. I've installed the driver's using ndsiwrapper, they are listed as installed when i run ndiswrapper -l. But for some reason, I can't get the hardware itself installed. Can anyone help me out?
Well, I blacklisted bcm43xx
Posts: 5
Well, I blacklisted bcm43xx like you said, rebooted, etc. I ran lspci and it output broadcom unknown device. Mepis still doesn't recognize the card itself, but it says the driver is installed just fine from ndiswrapper. I pulled the driver straight from my windowsXP partition. Any ideas on why Mepis still isn't seeing the card itself?
Quite often, ndiswrapper
Posts: 365
Quite often, ndiswrapper does NOT work with the XP driver.
It's usually recommended that you use the Windows 2000 version. I had the same problem with HP's built-in Broadcom wireless. Ndiswrapper with the driver from the XP folder would show the hardware present but it wouldn't work. Worked fine with the Win2000 driver.
If you don't have the Win2000 driver, you can download it from Dell (actually the download contains both Win2000 & XP versions), here:
You'll have to remove the XP version from ndiswrapper before adding the Win2000 version.
I should also add that if you hit a brick wall with ndiswrapper, you could try unblacklisting bcm43xx, blacklisting ndiswrapper, and getting the firmware for the native driver using bcm43xx-fwcutter. It's in the repo's. I didn't recommnend that at first because, in my experience, the ndiswrapper version still works better than the linux native driver. I'm sure that will change as the native driver improves.
Did you remove the driver
Posts: 1027
Did you remove the driver first before you installed yours?
ndiswrapper -e bcmwl5
(one is included with Mepis)
Also, make sure you all the files in the same directory in Linux -- I know you need .sys as well as .inf
navigate to that directory
ndiswrapper -i xxxx.inf
(whatever it's called)
Mike
Looks like that did it!
Posts: 5
Looks like that did it! Thanks for all the help guys! Well, now all I have to do is get ndiswrapper working right, and I'll be all set to go!
I was having significant
Posts: 2
I was having significant difficulties getting this working as well. (Inspiron 1501, 512m, 1390 wireless card, sempron)
Out of the box with 6.5 rc2 (64), iwconfig found wlan0. iwlist scan told me that nothing was found. (I'd give a copy/paste, but... it's working now, so it's finding stuff.)
(I had already rejected the Vista EULA, and was about to ask myself "Gee, do I need to run the other OS the first time, to do initial flash-loading on the card?" The answer is NO. The big trick is to find the right version of the bcmwl5 driver to load into ndiswrapper, and then reboot.)
The version I managed to get working was from the XP x64 tree on Dell's website.
http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151519.EXE
I'm posting this to help alleviate any bang-head-here issues that others are having. This took me about 4 days to finally get it working, and I'm not sure exactly what happened (between several re-installs of Mepis to get a "fresh start", an uncounted number of reboots, and compiling a fresh ndiswrapper 1.38) to finally make the green light come on.
I can say that I disabled the wireless hotkey control and enabled the wireless card in the BIOS/CMOS page. This seemed to have an effect, but I don't know if there were other changes interacting with that.
I intend to do a clean, controlled test as I commission the other (identical) laptop, and will post any findings.
FINALLY
Posts: 2
On a brand new Inspiron 1501 with a Dell 1390 wireless card, I went into the BIOS/CMOS page, made sure that the wireless card was turned on, and the wireless hotkey was turned off.
I had a green WiFi light on by the time I had a login prompt. iwlist scan confirms that it's seeing the networks in the neighborhood.
This is with 6.5 rc2 (64 bit). I'm willing to guess that the BIOS hotkey does some funky stuff that's not friendly to anything.
So, if you've searched and are trying to get it working on your system, use the F2 button and edit those BIOS settings.
WIRELESS ENABLED
WIRELESS HOTKEY DISABLED
... and I really wish I had found someone mentioning that to me about a week ago, when I was setting up the first one.
If I recall correctly, the
Posts: 365
If I recall correctly, the Dell 1390 is a Broadcom 43xx chipset card. The output of lspci will show if that's correct.
There's a native driver in Mepis 6.0 for that card, but not the needed firmware (licensing reasons). It should work with ndiswrapper, but won't if the native driver isn't prevented from loading as well.
That is accomplished by opening (as root) /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and adding the line blacklist bcm43xx
Save the file, reboot the machine and your wireless should work.
If it doesn't, then you may have loaded the wrong driver into ndiswrapper. Many cards require you get the driver from the Windows 2000 folder rather than the XP folder on the driver CD. Fortunately, that's pretty easy to correct.
Good Luck!