NEW Dell D420 (1490 wlan card)

[patrickf3]

Okay I just installed knoppix on my usb drive (works great) sure I had to disable the pcmcia card...but everything else seems to be working fine EXCEPT my wireless lan card...I found this on another site about the card.

Card: Dell Wireless 1490 (802.11a/b/g) Dual-Band WLAN miniPCI Card

* Chipset: Broadcom BCM4310 (rev 01)
* pciid: 14e4:4312
* Driver: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R115321.EXE
* Other: Use bcmwl5.inf in the DRIVER directory. Worked on Gentoo, ndiswrapper v1.13, kernel 2.6.15 (gentoo-sources)

I was just curious if anyone happened to get this working, I am using knoppix 5.01 (running from .iso off usb)...and seeing the way that I am running knoppix, I am not quite sure I can fix this problem very easily. If anyone has any hints, or knows what to do about this let me know please...if not, I understand...it is a fairly new product..

thanks
Patrick!

[CaGeN]

I also would like to know if anyone has had any success with this model.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Cagen

[chip.ling]

Okay I just installed knoppix on my usb drive (works great) sure I had to disable the pcmcia card...but everything else seems to be working fine EXCEPT my wireless lan card...I found this on another site about the card.

Card: Dell Wireless 1490 (802.11a/b/g) Dual-Band WLAN miniPCI Card

* Chipset: Broadcom BCM4310 (rev 01)
* pciid: 14e4:4312
* Driver: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R115321.EXE
* Other: Use bcmwl5.inf in the DRIVER directory. Worked on Gentoo, ndiswrapper v1.13, kernel 2.6.15 (gentoo-sources)

I was just curious if anyone happened to get this working, I am using knoppix 5.01 (running from .iso off usb)...and seeing the way that I am running knoppix, I am not quite sure I can fix this problem very easily. If anyone has any hints, or knows what to do about this let me know please...if not, I understand...it is a fairly new product..

thanks
Patrick!

I have success on Dell D600, D610 under knoppix 5.1.1. I believe it has Dell Wireless 1450 Dual-Band WLAN miniPCI card with Broadcom BCM43xx chipset. Since they all use the BCM43xx chipset, and you should be able to make the wireless working by following my footsteps.

I have no success on knoppix 5.0.1 but 5.1.1 works for me.

Here are the steps I make it work:

1. I am using ndiswrapper method, so the first step is to get the windows xp driver files for the wireless card. You need 2 files, bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys from the driver disk. I think it is originally an exe file and you have to run some program to extract it out. For me, I do a shortcut. I went to www.ubcd4win.com to download their later program. Install it to my hard drive in a directory called c:\ubcd4win. Then go to c:\ubcd4win\drivers\Net\Dell\1x00_wireless directory. The 2 drivers files are there.

2. With the knoppix 5.1.1 on the cd driver, boot up the OS with no cheat code.

3. Keep your eyes on the info shown on the screen when the autoconfigurating hardware devices. From my both machine, knoppix found two network cards in my machine, i.e. eth0 and eth1.

4. Wait until the knoppix x-window starts and finally you have the knoppix up and running.

5. Start the Konsole, i.e. click on the black TV like icon on the task bar. The system console will be up and running (looks like a DOS box)

6. Switch to supper user: (i.e. $ is the prompt symbol)

$ su

7. Mount your c: drive to mount point /media/???1

Be careful here, my D600 has the mount point called /media/hda1 but my D610 has the mount point called /media/sda1.

To check the name of the mount point, use the following command: (again, # is the prompt symbol means now you are the super user or so call "root")

# ls /mnt

It will give back all the name related to your harddisk/partition. (i.e. I have hda1, hda2 and hdc on my D600, hdc is my cd rom, hda1 is drive c: and hda2 is drive d: )

To mount the c: drive to the linux file system, type the following command:

# mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /media/hda1 -o ro,umask=000

If your c: drive is not in NTFS format, say in FAT32, you need to use the switch "-t vfat" to replace the "-t ntfs" in the above command. The same idea apply to "/dev/???a" in the command.

8. Go to the directory where the windows driver files are located.

# cd /media/hda1/ubcd4win/drivers/Net/Dell/1x00_wireless
# ls

the files bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys together with other files will be shown.

9. Copy the two driver files to the root's home directory

# cp bcmwl5.* ~

10. Go to root's home directory to see if the files are there.

# cd ~
# ls

You should see the two files are there.

11. Unmount the c: drive mount point. (optional). I usually don't want the Live CD OS hook up to my harddisk. But it is just the personal taste only. You can skip this part if you want.

# umount /media/hda1

12. If on step 3, you see there are two network cards detected (eth0 and eth1), most likely knoppix already loaded the bcm43xx driver module. However, this driver module will have conflict with the ndiswrapper network driver we are going to use, so if this is the case, we need to remove the bcm43xx driver module.

Check to see if the bcm43xx is there

# lsmod | grep bcm43xx

If the lsmod command returns some information back, it means the bcm43xx module are installed. Then remove it with the follow command. Else go to step 13.

# modprobe -r bcm43xx

Check the successful of the command

# lsmod | grep bcm43xx

It should return no entry.

13. Wrap the windows driver to the ndiswrapper module.

# ndiswrapper -i ~/bcmwl5.inf

The command will return a couple of lines feedback as

installing bcmwl5 ...
forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
:
:

14. Install the ndiswrapper module (now wrap with bcmwl5 driver)

# modprobe ndiswrapper

15. Check if the ndiswrapper is installed.

# lsmod | grep ndiswrapper

You should see entries return with ndiswrapper in there.

16. Check to see which is your wireless card symbolic name:

# iwconfig

My system returns three information back:

lo : no wireless extensions

eth0: no wireless extensions

eth1: IEEE 802.11g ESSID: off/any blah blah blah ...

Here eth0 is my wired network card, eth1 is the wireless card. Be careful your system may return difference name like wlan0 etc. If that is the case, replace eth1 with wlan0 in the following steps.

17. Set up the wireless network with ESSID and channel (for example: my wireless network essid=TESTSSID using channel 11)

# iwconfig eth1 essid TESTSSID channel 11

18. Check the result

# iwconfig

You should see the ESSID is set to TESTSSID and also the access point on the second line now has a valid ID.

19. Start the wireless network card

# ifconfig eth1 up

20. Check the result

# ifconfig

eth1 should appear in the result list.

21. Force the router to generate an IP address to the wireless network.

# pump -i eth1

22. Check the result

# ifconfig

The eth1 should have the IP address on the second line.

23. Exit the super user

# exit
$

24. You are ready to go, start the Web browser and see if you can surf the internet.

25. Welcome to the knoppix wireless world and have fun

Rgds,
Chip