Inspiron 5150, ubuntu & wireless (MiniPci 1350)

Posted on April 12, 2006 by peter

Posting wireless now, got wireless to work using ndiswrapper

Took me a bit longer than expected, mainly caused by  lspci reporting the cards as: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306.
I tried to get stuff to work using a driver for this card, but this didn’t work. The following worked much better:

  1. download the winxp drivers ftp://ftp.dell.com/network/R115321.EXE (almost 50 mb!?)
  2. unzip the file, yes I know the extension is .exe
  3. install ndiswrapper (sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper)
  4. install ndiswrapper gtk application (sudo apt-get install ndisgtk)
  5. go to: system >> administration >> windows wireless drivers
  6. select ‘bcmwl5.inf’ from the extracted DRIVER directory
  7. configure the network

First time I used ndisgtk, and I like it… it works!

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4 Responses to Inspiron 5150, ubuntu & wireless (MiniPci 1350)

  1. railsguru says:
    April 13, 2006 at 8:06 am

    You tried the new bcm43xx kernel driver right? On my Inspiron 8600 it only works with encryption turned off. BTW, the NetworkManager tool in the new Ubuntu (Dapper) really really rocks! Seamless wireless network roaming (once you configure the encryption ;-) !

    -andy

  2. peter says:
    April 13, 2006 at 7:49 pm

    Yup, it worked for a sec….

    Got stuff to work now using an older driver from the dell ftp site (R94825.EXE). Seems to provide the full security range:

    from dmesg:
    wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP, WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP

  3. peter says:
    April 13, 2006 at 11:02 pm

    Just installed dapper, had some troubles getting X to run… but works now… currently posting using the BCM43xx kernel driver!!

  4. railsguru says:
    April 14, 2006 at 1:12 pm

    with encryption??? If so, details! :-)

    -andy