dell wireless 1390wlan mini pci card not working

i have a compaq presario c700 which has the mysterious dell wlan 1390 mini pci card
i have installed the driver with bcm43xx and my light is working but the command

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iwlist eth0 scanning

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does not come up with any networks
the code

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iwconfig

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shows up my interface but still i cant get any networks

did you scan as root?
if you scan as a normal user it just shows the last result of the scan and since you dont have any result you will find no network

The bcm43xx driver module requires firmware to be installed before it will work correctly. Firmware is not installed by default, so if you did not install it, it is not installed. Look at the output of this command for any errors:

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dmesg

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Also, the bcm43xx driver is no longer used. The b43 driver has replaced it. It is available in newer kernels. (>= 2.6.18) It may not be compiled into the earlier 2.6.18 kernels, but it is available with a re-compile.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

You did not post your distro version or kernel version. This type of info should be posted when asking for help.

i use debian..i have kernel version 2.6.22
the code dmesgshows no errors as far as the driver is concerned and my light is up and running!
i usually log in as root so that might not be the problem

i finally decided to settle for ndiswrapper ..i installed it ,plus a new kernel for my debian machine 2.6.22-3-686....plus the headers for this kernel.
in the file

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/etc/modprobe.conf

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put the line

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alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

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then hit the code

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iwconfig

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which showed my interface wlan0
finally the code

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iwlist wlan0 scanning

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gave me some metworks and now am enjoying the net in linux
thanx guys!!!!!!:(

When you use NDISwrapper, you usually need to blacklist the b43 (or bcm43xx) module to keep it from loading. If NDISwrapper and b43 are loading at the same time, your wireless will not work.

In the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist add this to the bottom of the file:

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blacklist b43

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This will prevent it from automatically loading.

thanx waterhead!!!! i have done that already and my card is working okey

thanx waterhead...i have done that and my card is working alright...but i need to know which file to adit so that the driver can load at startup

Which distro are you using? Distros using the newer b43 driver instead of bcm43xx need to unload ssb before loading ndiswrapper. This becomes a problem if your ethernet driver is b44 which means you need to write a script to unload ssb, load ndiswrapper then allow ssb to load again with b44.

We can cross that bridge when we come to it though...for now what distro are you using, and can you post the output from the following commands

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/sbin/lsmod |grep -i ssb
/sbin/lsmod |grep -i b4
uname -r

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