Wireless Woes...

[jm47048]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Actually, even after driver installation and use of ndiswapper, it still does not recognize the hardware.

[jm47048]

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]

Try checking out the cheat codes wiki, I thought that I saw something about getting scripts to run at boot.