Getting wireless to work in dell inspiron

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 :)