View Full Version : Wireless Woes...
jm47048
01-24-2006, 06:14 PM
I am new to Knoppix (not Linux) and I have a question.
I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a Broadcom BCMWL5 Device on board. It is also known as a Dell 1470 Dual Band Wireless Mini PCI Card. Now, I know what driver is supposed to be installed via ndiswrapper, but I can't get the machine to see the hardware.
The message I get is this:
BCMWL5 Driver Present.
It should say this:
BCMWL5 Driver Present, Hardware Present.
Why won't the OS see my hardware? When I run the program lspci, it shows an unknown network controller. So I know the machine knows that at least something is there. What am I doing wrong? Please help. I wanted Knoppix to be a great alternative and without the wireless ability, it is not really worth having on the lap top.
Thanks for all of your help in advance.
jm47048
01-24-2006, 06:21 PM
Oh, and by the way, I know other people have gotten this hardware to work, I just don't understand why I can't. Thanks again!
UnderScore
01-24-2006, 07:25 PM
Broadcom does not support Linux at all. They give out no documentation of their chips & products and this results in no Linux drivers for broadcom wireless devices. This means that we must use a driver wrapper called ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sf.net). It is a translator driver that makes a network card driver for MS Windows work on Linux.
Normally the progression of how drivers work looks like:
Linux kernel -> Linux network driver -> network card
With Ndiswrapper, it looks like:
Linux kenerl -> ndiswrapper -> Windows network driver -> network card
So now you see that it requires not 1 but 2 pieces, the ndiswrapper & the windows driver. Well, Knoppix versions from 3.8.x to currently 4.0.2 include ndiswrapper so this piece is already done for you. There is no need to download & compile/install it. So now all that is left is to get the windows driver piece to work. You can follow the generic ndsiwrapper installation instructions at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation#Install_Windows_driver and you can find Network card info listed alphabetically by manufacturer at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List#L
jm47048
01-24-2006, 07:37 PM
I have done the NDISwrapper Install already. I know how to install the driver and I believe that I am installing the correct driver. I do not understand why the hardware iteself is not being recognized by the kernel. This is after driver installation. Please help. After driver installation, with ndiswrapper, I am not able configure the hardware, or bring up wlan0.
Thanks!
jm47048
01-24-2006, 07:48 PM
Actually, even after driver installation and use of ndiswapper, it still does not recognize the hardware.
jm47048
01-25-2006, 06:02 PM
Turned out I was using the wrong driver. I got online and now have a little shell script that gets the wireless card up and running.
Here is my question. I would like this silly little shell script to run automatically at boot. Can this be done and where would I put it and what should it be named?
dvryknopper
02-03-2006, 06:27 AM
Try checking out the cheat codes wiki, I thought that I saw something about getting scripts to run at boot.
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