Wireless on Inspirion 5160

I know the driver for that wireless card that Dell uses on your machine is a Broadcom, something like bcm43xx. If you have updated your system with kernel 2.6.20.16 all you have to do is click on the NetworkManager Applet on the desktop panel and set the values. Of course you have had to make sure in System/Administration/Network you have clicked your WLAN card as active.

You likely can get better help from the Ubuntu Forums at ubuntuforums.org.

Click on Hardware and Laptops. That should get you some pointed responses.

Dell doesn't directly support your WLAN card with their Ubuntu offerings for Inspiron E1505N laptops. I'm sure you can get your setup working. I did with the same card on an HP Pavilion dv2000. Good luck.

frank

The bcm43xx driver in 2.6.20-16 covers 4301 through 4313. The HP required the 4311. Kernel 2.6.20-15 didn't work with the drivers, a bug I believe that was fixed in -16.

frank

Sorry about taking a long time to reply, Frank, but I finally found a couple of Linux live cd's with Linux kernel vesion 2.16.20. This may not be the exact versions you were referring to, but, I could not get them to work on the Broadcom 4306, either. Using the BCM43xx drivers on Mint and Parsix Linux, the best I could get, even with using the included GUI config, and command line config, was the the wireless adapter was recognized. However, the BCM4306 would not configure. For example, in both cases, the essid was configured as "home". and the iwconfig command showed only an h . The frequency would not config at all. So, the whole exercise was dissapointing. Right now, I am using Puppy Linux with my Broadcom 4306 adapter configured with the Windows drivers and ndiswrapper. Thanks for your information. If I have tried the wrong kernal, please let me know. bob

Well, it's the Ubuntu 2.6.20-16 that worked. That's really all I know. The other kernels coming from other than Ubuntu likely have something different about them, no bcm43xx code, etc., to work correctly.

Good luck.

frank