Wireless on Dell Inspiron 5150 (was RE: dual boot laptop)

[Wayne Betts]

On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 18:54, David Horn wrote:
> If it matters, my Dell 5150 laptop is set to dual-boot WinXP Pro and Red Hat
> Desktop.  The install went flawlessly.  Simply partition the drive, install
> Windows first and then Linux (I'm thinking Fedora should work just as well).
> You should get a section during the Linux install when you will be asked
> about the boot loader.  I haven't seen Fedora recently, but it should still
> be GRUB and should work just fine.  

Since you mentioned a Dell [Inspiron] 5150 and I've spent several hours
in the last couple of days unsuccessfully trying to get the wireless
working on one, I thought I'd ask:

Have you have tried RHEL4 or 4.1? (I recently installed a 4.1
derivative, which works like a charm except for wireless...)

What wireless adapter (if any) do you have? (I have a Dell TrueMobile
1400 (which is a BCM4309, rev 2)).  Have you gotten it to work in Linux?

I can't get wireless to work, despite trying ndiswrapper (v1.3rc1) with
several different versions of the Windows driver, as well as a non-stock
kernel with the stack size increased to 16K.  Basics seem to work, (eg,
I can seemingly set the essid and mode and signal is found) but I can't
force a rate, and more importantly, I can't actually get a DHCP
address.  Other tidbits: I keep getting "Wireless event too big" in my
dmesg with every combination I've tried, and I have lots of "Invalid
misc" packets.  My original vendor-stock kernel is a 2.6.9, and the 16K
stack kernel is a 2.6.12 version.

BTW, this laptop used to have RH9 with ndiswrapper 0.4, and we got that
working, albeit with the caveat that steps had to be done in just the
right order.  We came up with a couple of scripts for various scenarios
that worked, but if you tried to tweak them, even in some surprisingly
simple ways, things would fall apart.  It was sheer luck that I stumbled
across the magic order in the first place.  But at least that worked --
now we have nothing. :-(

So, if you can either enlighten me, or at least give me some hope that
it can work, I'd appreciate it.  I've Googled my fingers off, with
tantalizing tidbits of hope, but no joy so far.

Wayne