Getting wireless to work in dell inspiron
Posted on 23rd September 2008 by TaggyWireless in dell inspiron machines dont work out of the box (No! not even the all so powerful ubuntu :P )
I installed opensuse11 in my machine in the hope to get windowsXP running on it .
Here are the steps u need to follow to get wireless on ur linux box .
Dell inspiron ships in with Broadcom wireless cards and this post will work *only* for them so you might just want to check if you should be doing the below steps .
1. lspci | grep BCM43
This should print out the broadcom details.
2.Once you are sure, go ahead and download the driver for broadcom
wget http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32_5_10_27_6.tar.gz
3. tar jxvf hybrid-portsrc-x86_32_5_10_27_6.tar.gz
4. make -C /lib/modules/2.6.25.5-1.1-pae/build M=`pwd`
Note: /lib/modules/2.6.25.5-1.1-pae/ is for my suse box. you should be replacing that with your kernel libs path ,usually in the same /lib.modules/2.XXX/build
5.Just incase you have any other modules for BCM loaded ,we must delete it .
rmmod b43
6.now load ours
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
and now the last step ,load the module by
insmod wl.ko
a iwconfig should print ou something like his for you.
eth1 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:”RT2561_6″ Nickname:”"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:18:02:86:9C:E0
Bit Rate=36 Mb/s Tx-Power:32 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Managementmode:All packets received
Link Quality=2/5 Signal level=-70 dBm Noise level=-92 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:252 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
If you do see something like this,then congratulations :) else better luck you could be in for some fun ride .:p
And the final step to actually connect.Use network manager GUI to connect or simpley sudo dhclient to be online :)
