DELL 1350 WLAN Working

[grimdestripador]

I first posed this as a help request, but have since fixed it. So I just edited it to be helpfull for people with my problem. The following will also work with Ubuntu Edgy.

It probally breaks the mintWIFI installation since ndiswrapper is a dependency.
I'll check into this,

I have a Dell Laptop with a Dell Wireless 802.11 b/g PCmcia Card
It is a Dell Wireless 1350 WLAN, Model WL-611GW and uses the BCM43XX chipset.

Background:
First by wireless driver is supported by the kernel. The problem is that Dell decided to make their PCMCIA wireless card use the bcm43xx chipset but also included some other stuff in there to make it non standard.

Uninstall and prepare for compiling

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sudo rmmod ndiswrapper
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-'uname -r'


Fix the bad kernel driver

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sudo echo "blacklist bcm43xx" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist


verify that it is blacklisted & Reboot

#Download ndiswrapper from souceforge and the driver from Dell

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wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-1.37.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ndiswrapper-1.37.tar.gz

wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R140747.EXE
unzip -a R140747.EXE


cd ~/ndiswrapper-1.37
Do the following many times, and manually "sudo rm -R" the directory's that list

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sudo make uninstall


Install

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sudo make
sudo make install


Goto the extracted Dell driver and Assign it to ndiswrapper

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cd /DRIVER
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper


and if it works, you should see blinking lights

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sudo iwlist scanning


[matrixebiz]

This worked for my Dell Latitude D630;

Start terminal


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source


Reboot laptop

[grimdestripador]

Whoa, back from the dead. Original Post was, Thu Feb 22, 2007 9:03 pm. and for Linux Mint Edgy. I'm guessing yours is for Linux Mint Maya?

[matrixebiz]

whoa, didn't realize but I came upon this post searching for a solution so I guess it's better to have the updated solution