Dell Wireless card

[essenby]

Hi.  I've got a Dell Lattitude 610 laptop which is equipped with t Dell 1470 Dual band wireless card.  I believe this is a Broadcom unit as the instaled driver is the Broadcom BCMWL5.SYS.  I am trying to test this using the Kubuntu 6.06 live CD before going the whole hog and installing Kubuntu.

The system seems to recognise the card but does not seem able to save any set up I try.  I click on "Configure interface", enter the correct SSID and WEP key and change this to "Hexadecimal" and Apply the changes, but the interface will not enable and when I go back to "Configure interface" the type of WEP key has mysteriously changed back to ASCII.

Is this a known issue or am I expecting too much from a live CD.  Are there any other ways I can test if this will work before I commit to a full install?

[essenby]

Re: Dell Wireless card

*bump*

Am I the only one who has seen this problem?  Surely there must be a wizard out there with a solution - or who knows a place I can look to find one? Please?

[James1]

Re: Dell Wireless card

I do not know much about the live cd side of things to be honest but I say that the Broadcom card will work a treat if you do install Kubuntu.

I have an Acer laptop and it has a Broadcom 4318 wifi card in it.

I had to use ndiswrapper and knetworkmanager and it does not cause any problems.

So if you do take the plunge you can get it working fine.

This link may help you. I did the 2nd post.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...64.0;topicseen

[The Liquidator]

Re: Dell Wireless card

Try this

From Network settings select administrator mode and then just enable the adapter and from within configure simply select dhcp (if that is what your router uses i.e dynamic IP addresses). if your card is not enabled by this then you will probably need ndiswrapper.

Then go to the start menu and select internet/wireless assistant. Put your settings in there. IIRC simply typing in the charcters will cause the wizard to automatically recognise that it's a WEP connection. That should then connect you. Please note you will be asked for your sudo password. Also, the connection will not be made automatically when you next boot.

You might also set kwifi manager to run on startup so you have something in the taskbar to say whether you are connected or not.

Hope this helps

Ian

[adamsjw2]

Re: Dell Wireless card

Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron with an Intel pcw2200 card. I couldn't never connect with kwifimanager, I had to use wlassistant.
I'm not sure this will help, but I thought I'd mention it.
JimA.

[essenby]

Re: Dell Wireless card

Thanks for all the suggestions people. I was so excited I booted from the LiveCD at work (with ethernet connection) tr try them all out. However, I did notice that there were a couple of messages in the boot sequence, somthing like

unable to locate bcm43xx microcode

. I'm guessing that as the card has a Broadcon shipset (4318) this is significant !

True to form, although the interface is listed in Network Settings no amount of swearing or persuasion will enable it. Is there any way of adding the required microcode to the LiveCD or am I stuck with having to do a full disk install and trying to configure that to work?

[essenby]

Re: Dell Wireless card

" The Liquidator. My problem is that the card will NOT enable from within Network Settings - probably due the the messages mentioned above. It must be an issue with the Live CD as when I tried from a PCLinuxOS LiveCD I was able to enable the card using modprobe bcm43xx