Getting wireless to work in dell inspiron

Posted by Taggy as Dell, SUSE, Technology, driver, inspiron, linux, network, opensuse, wireless

Wireless in dell inspiron machines dont work out of the box (No! not even the all so powerful ubuntu :P )


I installed opensuse11 in my machine in the hope to get windowsXP running on it .

Here are the steps u need to follow to get wireless on ur linux box .


Dell inspiron ships in with Broadcom wireless cards and this post will work *only* for them so you might just want to check if you should be doing the below steps .

1. lspci | grep BCM43


This should print out the broadcom details.

2.Once you are sure, go ahead and download the driver for broadcom


wget http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32_5_10_27_6.tar.gz

3. tar jxvf hybrid-portsrc-x86_32_5_10_27_6.tar.gz

4. make -C /lib/modules/2.6.25.5-1.1-pae/build M=`pwd`


Note: /lib/modules/2.6.25.5-1.1-pae/ is for my suse box. you should be replacing that with your kernel libs path ,usually in the same /lib.modules/2.XXX/build

5.Just incase you have any other modules for BCM loaded ,we must delete it .


rmmod b43

6.now load ours


modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip

and now the last step ,load the module by


insmod wl.ko

a iwconfig should print ou something like his for you.

eth1      IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:”RT2561_6″  Nickname:””


Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:18:02:86:9C:E0


Bit Rate=36 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm


Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off


Power Managementmode:All packets received


Link Quality=2/5  Signal level=-70 dBm  Noise level=-92 dBm


Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0


Tx excessive retries:252  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

If you do see something like this,then congratulations :) else better luck  you could be in for some fun ride .:p

And the final step to actually connect.Use network manager GUI to connect or simpley sudo dhclient  to be online :)

Popularity: 2%



September 23, 2008 | Filed Under Dell, SUSE, Technology, driver, inspiron, linux, network, opensuse, wireless | Comments Off 

Best buys this season: The ELCOT Student Laptop

Posted by imdonatello as Acer, Dell, ELCOT, Product, SUSE, laptop, linux, students, ubuntu


The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu has started this year’s sale of inexpensive laptops with preloaded Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise) for students studying in Tamil Nadu. There have been many press releases, for example, see this one. The laptop is said to be procured from Dell or Acer.

The high capacity version of the ELCOT laptop is priced at Rs. 31,717 and is really cheap! To be really convinced of this, I checked out the Dell site for their price on an equivalent configuration. This is really easy, because they have a nice customise feature on their site. So I went here and chose options to make the configuration equivalent to ELCOT’s config here. The results are astounding! The Dell price turns out to be Rs. 55317! The big price addons were 7000 rupees for the 320 GB upgrade, from 160 GB and the 3 years international support which added another (approx.) 8000 rupees. Of course, since Dell has not rolled out its preloaded Linux version in India (Dell sells with Ubuntu preloaded, in the US), the price above includes the price of Microsoft’s operating system.

Students are going to make a killing in this sale! Hurry! Last date for registrations in this first phase is July 15.

Edit: Elcot has extended the last date, as expected. The new last date is 31 July.

Edit 2: Elcot has further extended the last date! The new last date is 15 August.

Edit 3: Elcot has further extended the last date! The new last date is 31 August. And, I’m bored of updating this.

Edit 4: Elcot has finally closed the student laptop scheme 2008.


Popularity: 6%



July 8, 2008 | Filed Under Acer, Dell, ELCOT, Product, SUSE, laptop, linux, students, ubuntu | Comments Off