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truemobile 1150 wireless problem - undetected


Guest BatteryAcid
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Guest BatteryAcid

First of all, i just want to say that MDK 9.2 is really getting me excited about using Linux.

 

However, it's been driving me up the wall trying to get my Dell Truemobile 1150 wireless card to work. It is an internal card, built in to my Dell Inspiron 8200. I've looked in the FAQ and i was so excited to find a simple, step-by-step instruction manual on how to get this to work. I've been searching google all day now trying to come up with something and all i've got so far is a bunch of fragmented information, all of which is different. About the only thing i know is that the card uses the orinoco driver. I've downloaded a few of these, i've tried using HardDrake, and yet my poor laptop is still tethered to the router on my desk. :wall:

 

Speaking of the FAQ, i was very excited to see it but incredibly disheartened to find it to not work. The first step, which is :

/sbin/cardctl ident

returns the following:

no product info available

for both sockets 0 and 1.

 

HardDrake identifies the card as follows:

Vendor: Broadcom Corporation

Bus: PCI

Bus Identification 14e4:4301:1028:407

Location on the bus: 2:3:0

Description: BCM4301 802.11b

Module: unknown

Media class: NETWORK_OTHER

 

What am I to make of this? I'm getting very frustrated dealing with this issue. There are a few other issues i have to iron out too, aside from which i'm loving Mandrake.

 

Thanks for any and all help folks. It is much appreciated.

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You're going to have to use either NdisWrapper or DriverLoard to use this card. Both are said to support the Broadcom 4301 chipset that this card uses. Linuxant seems to have better directions, and also has RPM's for Mandrake 9.2

 

regretably, I can't give you much further direction as I've never used either of these and the information I provided is just from a google search I did, so hopefully if you have questions someone with experience will stop by and help ya ;)

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Guest BatteryAcid

hey, thanks for that!

 

so from what this says the broadcom card is not supported and i have to use ndiswrapper or the linuxant product to "wrap" a windows driver to work with Linux. Would it be better to get a wireless card that is supported by Linux and use that? I'm not intimidated by having to configure a driver wrapper, but i worry about performance and reliability. Plus it would probably be easier :P

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it would be easier to get an already support PCMCIA wireless card. but it's a question of, do you want to spend the money? or would you rather take a little time?

 

I haven't heard of any perfomance or reliability issues related to ndiswrapper or linuxant, and many users here have configured such a setup. however, if you found an orinoco gold wireless card for cheap i'm pretty sure it would be recognized right away.

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Guest BatteryAcid

i'll keep playing with this for a bit. Right now my wired connection at work isnt working either so it will have to wait until I get back on my network at home. Our network here got hit with a big worm attack yesterday, and ISD(Information Services Division) is blocking all infected computers. Is it possible that my laptop received the worm as well and is now blocked? The worm only affects Windows computers but i'd imagine its possible that my machine has it and can infect other machines, even though it is not affected itself, or ISD is paranoid and blocked me anyway.

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If you didn't receive an email containing the worm, then you don't have it and you can't be carrying it. If it's not spread via e-mail, then you definitely don't have it because it would have to infect your system to be on your system...

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Guest BatteryAcid

ok, cool. I'll have to get the ndis wrapper set up. If i can just shift the focus a bit...

 

I'm also trying to get my video card set up - a mobility radeon 9000. Apparently the driver - for the FireGL Mobility 9000 - requires me to recompile/configure my kernel. I've downloaded the kernel source from the MDK10 cd, and put it in /usr/src. Then, following the guide, i did:

 

ln -s /usr/src/linuc-2.6.3-7mdk /usr/src/linux

 

Now i have to reconfigure my kernel. Is there a guide somewhere on how i can do this?

 

Thanks guys.

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My suggestion for recomiling the kernel is - have a go: experiment. As long as you keep the original kernel then you will always be able to boot back into a stable system.

 

To do the configure do:

cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig

 

And work your way through that little lot...

 

It may also be worthwhile trying to find out if someone has posted their kernel .config file on the internet - one specific to this laptop. You can then use that as a base and only have to make a few minor edits - if any at all...

Edited by phunni
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Guest BatteryAcid
My suggestion for recomiling the kernel is - have a go: experiment.  As long as you keep the original kernel then you will always be able to boot back into a stable system.

 

To do the configure do:

cd /usr/src/linux<!--QuoteEBegin-->make menuconfig

 

And work your way through that little lot...

 

It may also be worthwhile trying to find out if someone has posted their kernel .config file on the internet - one specific to this laptop.  You can then use that as a base and only have to make a few minor edits - if any at all...

 

thanks a bunch, man. I'm pretty sure the video card driver is now working. I used to get 150 or so fps with glxgears, after doing the kernel menuconfig i'm now getting 1445 or so. Much better.

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Good job - I'm assuming since you see a perfomance change that you actually recompiled the kernel as well as just re-configuring it ;)

 

It does sound like that jump in FPS means your video card is working - not much else would explain that...

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Guest BatteryAcid
Good job - I'm assuming since you see a perfomance change that you actually recompiled the kernel as well as just re-configuring it ;)

 

It does sound like that jump in FPS means your video card is working - not much else would explain that...

 

not sure if i recompiled it.... i did "make menuconfig" and worked through it. is there a step i missed? The FPS in Enemy Territory (the only reason i really wanted to get the driver installed properly) is now much better but performance is still not up to my liking completely. For example if i run resolutions lower than my screen resolution (1600x1200) it runs similar to windowed mode... even though full screen is enabled in the game. it's not too big a deal but it would be nice if the game was smoother.

 

thanks

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