Great problem wifi on XPS M1330 with Intel 4965

Don't despair scioff...

It will work under ubuntu, im posting right now from a new xps 1530 but dell support were no help at all.

From what I've experienced buying laptops from dell, you'll get a good price but their customer support after you've purchased is terrible, i mean absolutely terrible...

don't phone them if it's anything in the slightest technical, the language barrier and the lack of knowledge is just time consuming and expensive, it's like speaking to robots.

 

You'll be using the iwl3945 intel drivers for that wifi card yeh?

 

type 

dmesg | grep iwl3945

in the console

It'll say something like ...  "mac in is in deep sleep "

The intel wifi drivers seem to be off a very poor poor quality. Which is suprising seeing as intel are actually involved in this development, a very bad advert for intel.

The driver doesn't seem to be able to cope with idling.

 

In BIOS, make sure that a setting called 'wifi catcher' (i think its called that) is set to off and make sure the wifi switch on the right side of the laptop isn't in sleep mode (off mode?)

 

I've found that if i boot into vista first, then reboot into ubuntu, it usually works (so you might need vista back)....

Sometimes it takes a few reboots, sometimes back into vista then into ubuntu, but tonight i cold booted into ubuntu and the card was recognised first time.

 

Its erratic, and again a very poor advert for intel and therefore, the components that dell uses.

 

When the card is recognised and is working you'll also get dropouts where when you try and browse a site, you'll get a host not found because it's lost connection again.

Go into console and type

sudo ifdown -a

[enter]

sudo ifup -a

[enter]

 

And it'll bring the connection up. This always works if the card is recognised at startup and the card will stay working (till the next reboot).

 

Using my new laptop with ubuntu has been great, but things like this, with poor open source drivers (again also written with help from intel) has made using ubuntu on this laptop annoying.

 

The drivers will probably improve, maybe with the new intepid version.

But this has put me off ever buying a dell again. You get good prices from them, but there's nothing of worth from a service perspective and the components are questioopenable.

 

Have a read at the ubuntu forums, they're a great help where you'll people willing to help. Ubunti is great, it's just that it's not a money maker for the corporations, so driver support can be bad

hope you get it working

 

Thanks blueyhue :-D

i have resolved the problem...the wifi card are disabled on bios......

i think is the standard bios setup....or i don't know why is disabled only on my XPS 1330 !!! :-D

now Ubuntu is very Rock!!! :-D

thanks!