Trick to loading wireless card (Dell 1350)

Forum: DSL Tips and Tricks
Topic: Trick to loading wireless card (Dell 1350)
started by: jpeters

Posted by jpeters on April 15 2006,05:56

After copying BCMWL5.inf and BCMWL5.sys files to your hard drive, enter the path in NDISWRAPPER (DSLpanel) along with SID, etc. Make sure your hard disk is mounted first before pushing "OK" (note: you will not have another shot at it if you forget; it just won't connect without rebooting).

After successfully connecting, you'll gleefully want to respond "yes" when asked if you got the wireless card working (when shutting down). This will insure that it won't work again, because the path to your unmounted hard drive will attempt to load drivers when rebooting, causing a lot of error messages. In addition, there's no way to get it to connect again by reconfiguring as before without rebooting using "NORESORE" (push F2 when booting, and enter "DSL NORESTORE) . The trick here is to comment out (place an " # " before the line...or just erase the damn thing) the path listed in opt/bootlocal.sh, "opt/myndis.sh" . This will stop the computer from attempting to load the path to your unmounted hard drive on startup (which doesn't make a lot of sense anyway, does it...).

Of course, this means you have to run NDISWRAPPER every time you boot up to get the card working (which isn't so gleeful after the third or fourth time). Changing the name of the driver to "netcard" allows you to use the default driver name listed when you run NDISWRAPPER from DSLpanel. (Note, since windows XP doesn't use FAT, the windows directory doesn't show up, so I copied the drivers to the hardrive using EMELfm, and backspace out "/windows" in the default path in NDISWRAPPER (not overly ungleeful; it's trying to find phrases that match BCMWL5 that get tiresome...I won't post a few I came up with).

Don't forget to reboot with DSL NORESTORE after screwing up your files.
You don't get a second chance to connect with NDISWRAPPER after any errors, and the little "beep" that goes off with "NO CONNECTION" goes straight to the heart; that can't be very healthy.

These basic comments are intended for the newby's like myself, with about 2 days of experience. :cool:

Posted by safesys on April 16 2006,13:53

Can't you just include the command to mount the harddrive in bootlocal.sh before the ndiswrapper call?

Posted by roberts on April 16 2006,14:53

Using these cards without Windows, I always copy the their Windows drivers to my home directory in dsl.

This too, makes it very simple and thus will avoid the frustration that you encountered.

Maybe dropping the /mnt/hda1/windows/ from the text box is a good suggestion?

Posted by jpeters on April 16 2006,19:38

Quote (safesys @ April 16 2006,09:53)

Can't you just include the command to mount the harddrive in bootlocal.sh before the ndiswrapper call?

Sounds good to me! What is it?? Thanks

Posted by safesys on April 16 2006,19:42

just:

mount /dev/hda1

should do the trick - assuming it is hda1 partition you want to mount - and make it accessible via /mnt/hda1

Posted by jpeters on April 16 2006,19:52

Quote (roberts @ April 16 2006,10:53)

For some reason, that didn't work and the card wouldn't connect. It also didn't connect when I used a deeper path on my C drive.

Posted by roberts on April 16 2006,21:19

My point being is that DSL using ndiswrapper is not married to having Windows installed on the machine.

The several cards that I tested for various users was on a machine with no Windows installed.
Only Windows drivers were needed and obtained from the ndsiwrapper site at sourceforge.

I did not install any of the drivers in Windows, not did I even test the cards within Windows.

DSL is designed to be nomadic and not dependent on being installed or requiring other OS to function.

I am glad that you have a solution. It is never a problem when something works.

But I will always follow up a post which makes one thing that DSL would require a mounted Windows partition in order to function.

Posted by jpeters on April 16 2006,21:54

Quote (safesys @ April 16 2006,15:42)

just:

mount /dev/hda1

should do the trick - assuming it is hda1 partition you want to mount - and make it accessible via /mnt/hda1

Thanks. For some reason, I can't get DSL to save the edited file to disk. Hda1 is mounted, I've saved the Beaver file, and used the backup feature through the fluxbox system. Anyway, the command works fine (I checked it via the terminal), and I'll try and figure out how to load it.

Posted by jpeters on April 16 2006,22:04

Quote (roberts @ April 16 2006,17:19)

The card didn't work if loaded from inside the Windows partition (I attempted that so that I could use the default path in the text box). It only worked when I moved the files using DSL directly onto hda1 (after first attempting to load from /home/dsl, which didn't work).

Posted by safesys on April 16 2006,22:07

if you can clarify what mean by "I can't get DSL to save the edited file to disk." then someone might have come across it before and be able to help save you some time.

Posted by jpeters on April 17 2006,06:13

Quote (safesys @ April 16 2006,18:07)

if you can clarify what mean by "I can't get DSL to save the edited file to disk." then someone might have come across it before and be able to help save you some time.

I finally got it to save, and hda1 mounted and ndiswrapper installed the card. Interestingly, the operating system tried to find the wireless driver before it had a chance to load, and printed an error when " ls /etc/ndiswrapper" didn't produce anything. The whole process slows up the initial boot, perhaps waiting for the wireless connection before moving on to load the desktop, but is probably faster than loading the card manually. Thanks for your help on this!

Posted by kulkulcaan on April 21 2006,11:24

I have a Dell 1300 Laptop with a sigmatel wireless card.
I'm booting off a usb pen.

I've copied the wireless card drivers from windows onto my usb pen. I've also installed ndiswrapper from cd (as network not working yet).

When I try to configure the card using ndiswrapper I manage to load the driver ok but if I;

modprobe ndiswrapper

my laptop freezes and I have to reboot.

I've tried several times to configure the card through a term session and using the gui tool but my laptop always locks up.

Has anyone had this problem ??

K

Posted by jpeters on April 21 2006,16:02

Quote (kulkulcaan @ April 21 2006,07:24)

I have a Dell 1300 Laptop with a sigmatel wireless card.

When I try to configure the card using ndiswrapper I manage to load the driver ok but if I;

modprobe ndiswrapper

my laptop freezes and I have to reboot.

K

Did you try uninstalling the driver "ndiswrapper -e netcard" , and/or removing it first "rmmod ndiswrapper" before loading it again?

Posted by roberts on April 21 2006,16:24

From the ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net site:

Install Windows driver

Important: Do NOT use drivers on your CD. They may work, but you may experience kernel crashes etc., if the driver on your CD has not been tested.

Instead you should check the ndiswarpper.sourceforge.net site for where to download a tested and known working driver.

Look for an update in ndiswrapper in the next version of DSL.

Posted by panic on April 23 2006,05:12

Just thought I'd chime in here, to give a rundown of what I did to get the 1350 card to work.

First my setup:

DSL setup on a Dell Inspiron 1000.
Dell partition is still hda1
extended partition for hda2

hda3 and hda4 are in the extended partition
hda3 is setup ext2fs, and this is where I have a frugul grub install done.
hda4 is raiserFS, and where I backup my stuff to.

First off, I set my backup to go to hda4

I copied the bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys to /mnt/hda4

Run ndiswrapper, and set the path to /mnt/hda4/bmcwl5.inf
Device is wlan0
and ssid is whatever your network name is [in your router, not your windows workgroup name ;)]

Key - I had to change my router from wpa-psk to 128bit WEP, and once you do that, input the hexadecimal key that your router gives you, and remember to enter it with a colon between each set. i.e. 71:5b:cf...

Now, go into /opt/bootlocal.sh and add this:

mount /dev/hda4

This will mount the hard drive where your wireless drivers are before it tries to load the wireless.

Save, backup, and reboot, and you should be good.

I hope this helps out, it took me quite a while to dig this all up and get it working, so I thought this might help some of you guys.

Also, be sure to change the hard drive locations where applicable for your individual setup