Re: My Laptop

[Larry Finger <larry finger lwfinger net>]

Herbert Taylor wrote:
> I wanted to see if I could get some advise on what to do concerning 
> wireless on my laptop.  I have a Dell Inspiron B130 with a Dell wireless 
> card, 1370 WLAN, mini-PC card.  It works fine on windows as does a 
> Linksys WUSB54G.
>
> I have Ubuntu loaded right now in a dual boot, that one of my geek 
> friends worked on and am not sure if it will ever work right again.  I 
> have been unable to get get any drivers that will load or work with 
> Ubuntu and network manager at all.  I was using Fedora 6, but had 
> problems with that.  I am fairly new to Linux as you can guess.
>
> Daniel Fetchinson (I believe) wrote that he installed Fedora 8 and 
> network manager was working just fine and he connected to his wireless 
> network.  I was thinking seriously of going back to Fedora but unable to 
> find a way to get a copy were we are staying for the winter in Florida.
>
> Not sure if my Dell (Broadcom card I believe) will work the same way 
> with Fedora 8. Wish I knew more about this stuff.  Linux out performs 
> Windows in all ways, but right now I am stuck using windows while I am 
> down down here for 5 months. Any suggestions on what I might be able to 
> do would be greatly appreciated. If I could get this thing to work I 
> could drop windows completely.

The Dell 1370 is a BCM4318 and will work with the driver named bcm43xx in kernels 2.6.21 and later. 
 Kernel 2.6.24-rc5 also includes a better driver named b43.

One problem you will have with Ubuntu is that they configure their kernels without enabling the 
debug messages for bcm43xx, which greatly complicates getting started.

To use bcm43xx or b43, you will have to install firmware as the Broadcom copyright prevents 
distribution of this firmware. Consult
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware for instructions on downloading _AND_ 
installing the correct firmware (version 3 for bcm43xx, version 4 for b43).

In any future postings regarding this issue, please include the output of the 'uname -r' command, 
and the output of 'dmesg | grep bcm43xx' or 'dmesg | grep b43'. The flavor you use will be 
determined by the driver you are trying to use.

Larry