Trouble with Dell Wireless 1390

[FlameOfTheVoid]

Installed openSuSe 11.0 on a Dell Vostro 1500 with the Dell Wireless 1390. Cannot get wireless working correctly. Light is illuminated but does not detect any networks. Not sure on kernal version at the moment but can find out when I get back to the laptop. I ran all the automatic updates and still nothing. Need some help here. My knowledge of linux is moderate at best so I will need detailed instructions.

[techieMoe]

If I'm not mistaken, the Dell 1390 uses a Broadcom chipset. This means that you'll need to find the MS Windows drivers for it and install them using a program called ndiswrapper.

[FlameOfTheVoid]

Ya, its the broadcom chip. I hade a smiliar problem using 10.3 Posted here. Would it be the same process uner 11.0?

[techieMoe]

Ya, its the broadcom chip. I hade a smiliar problem using 10.3 Posted here. Would it be the same process uner 11.0?

It should work the same, yes.

[waterhead]

The process is the same, except that there is a newer Linux driver that is being loaded. It is the b43 driver, and is much improved over the old bcm43xx driver. In fact it has more functions possible than using the NDISwrapper method can provide.

If you want to use the b43 driver (I highly recommend it), firmware has to first be installed. SUSE 11.0 has an install script to easily do this, just run this command:

sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware

Of course, you would need a wired LAN connection for this to work.

[FlameOfTheVoid]

seems to work but it shows that my connection is very low and the AP is only 5 feet away

[waterhead]

If Windows shows a good connection, it could actually be lying to you.

In the end, if it works OK, don't worry too much about the reported signal strength. Some Broadcom chipsets are better than the others.

To see what chipset that you actually have, enter this commnd into a terminal.

lspci

Post the output if you want.

[FlameOfTheVoid]

0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)

[waterhead]

Here's some info on the Broadcom chips:
b43 - Linux Wireless

If you start having some problems, post back. Otherwise just use it. I have a Broadcom in my garage. It drops out occasionally, but I just reconnect and don't worry about it.