Help setting Up Wireless on my Dell Inspiron 1501

[waterhead]

I thought that you had it working. Why are you trying to install the driver?

I just wanted to know more about the driver for other users benefit.

[mjr4189]

It was working in 8.04. now i am trying to use it in 8.10

[waterhead]

I'm guessing that Ubuntu must have a driver package that you could install for the driver. But it never hurts to learn how to install it from source. That way you can install it in other distros.

Use the modprobe command instead of insmod. Modprobe doesn't need the .ko suffex.

[mjr4189]

its not that the ko suffix isnt there. the file i need is right there i am staring at it. but as per the instructions from broadcom it says to "insmod <path>/wl.ko". i do that and it cant find the file although i typed the path in probably about 20 times and even jsut did a copy paste

[waterhead]

I just compiled and installed it on my Fedora 10/Eee PC. I didn't run into any problems at all. I don't know what I did differently than you. I just followed the instructions that are in the file available at the driver download site.

http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/README.txt

I unpacked the file in a folder named wl, at this location:
/media/disk/wl

Here are the exact commands that I used. I didn't realize that i wasn't root until I tried a modprobe (oops). I manually copied the tar file to the wl folder after creating it

cd /media/disk
mkdir /media/disk/wl
cd wl
tar xvfz hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686/build M=`pwd`
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
su
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
insmod /media/disk/wl/wl.ko

[mjr4189]

i dont know man, i jsut keeps getting

insmod: error inserting '/home/mjr4189/hybrid_wl/wl.ko': -1 File exists

[waterhead]

Remember, Ubuntu supports that wireless "out-of-the-box". Maybe you are getting the "file exists" error because of just that. The module is already present in that directory.