21 Jan 2008
My first task in Guatemala was to get Jesus’s wireless going.
He’s running Ubuntu Feisty 64 on a Compaq Presario V6000 (AMD Turion 64 x2). The wireless card is a Dell 1390 mini-PCI (wireless chipset bcm43xx).
Inspired by these instructions for Ultima Linux, I did the following as root:
- installed ndiswrapper and ndisgtk – aptitude install ndiswrapper-common ndisgtk
- blacklisted the built-in bcm43xx driver, by adding blacklist bcm43xx to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
- manually loaded the ndiswrapper module by doing modprobe ndiswrapper and forced it to load on every boot by adding the line ndiswrapper to /etc/modules
- downloaded the Dell version of the driver (R174291.exe) 1 2 and unpacked the .exe using wine
- reloaded the gnome panel – killall gnome-panel
- ran System, Administration, Windows Wireless Drivers, and loaded the extracted driver from ~/.wine/drive_c/dell/drivers/R174291
- after a reboot :-( Network Manager (top right) detected wireless networks, and we were able to connect. If you have any problems, check the driver has loaded by running ndiswrapper -l