| Kubuntu 7.10 Install: Dell Inspiron 1720 - Part 3 |
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| Tech Notes - Linux |
| Written by Rick |
| Sunday, 13 April 2008 00:00 |
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Okay, so the wireless adapter isn't working! Unfortunately, this fix wasn't clean or easy. Dell uses several different wireless adapters in their laptops. After following information in the forum at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=704088 I still didn't get it to work. But, wait...the instructions say to use a driver called bcmwl5.inf. My download from Dell had bcmwl6.inf! It's the wrong driver? I downloaded all the available drivers for wireless cards for my machine from Dell. During the process of following the instructions for the ndiswrapper, lo-and-behold I have a new selection in KMenus. Under settings I now have a Windows Wireless Drivers menu item. That's neat, I wonder what that does? Well as the name implies, it lists the driver I installed during the ndiswapper instructions referenced above. Now I can modify oe change the Windows drivers installed for my wireless card through the menus. The utility allowed me to remove and install the correct driver (bcmwl5.inf). After which (and a reboot) the wireless adapter works!! All this may sound easy in hindsight, but it took several hours of trying different things to get to this point. That's the price of free! Beats payin' for an OS and still having to work around bugs to get things to work. Think Windows Vista would have been easier? It may have been. But, if you read any of the posting on the 'net about Vista, you know that many people have similar problems getting hardware and applications to work. Particularly on older machines. Now to get the sound to work...
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