Dell Truemobile 1300 Wireless on Linux (Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora, Debian)

SOLUTION TO WIRELESS NETWORKING ON BROADCOM:
This solution works with a fresh install of Mandrake 10.1; it was recommended to me by someone who runs Debian.

Any Dell Inspiron using a Dell Truemobile 1300 can run Mandrake 10.1 Community Linux for free; this was tested on Mandrakes 10.1 Community Linux, and Debian; kernel build 2.8.1, using ndiswrapper 1.2 or 0.9 (0.9 seems to be the best version of ndiswrapper).

1) ndiswrapper 1.2 install
a) download, untar, ungzip into a directory
b) 'make install' from the directory where it has been unarchived
- if the compile fails its because you dont have the kernel sources package
installed, make sure to install the kernel sources package if this fails
- if the compile succeeds ndiswrapper has been installed correctly,
the scripts loadndiswrapper and ndiswrapper directories are under
/etc/ndiswrapper, the utilities (ndiswrapper program) should be located /path/ndiswrapper-1.2/utils

2) locate bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf, distributed through broadcom's website as the BCM94306 driver set for WINDOWS, and use the ndiswrapper util,
probably in the ndiswrapper/utils directory, like this:
ndiswrapper -i /pathtofile/bcmwl5.inf
- to get these files you can extract them from Broadcom's windows
drivers

To make sure ndiswrapper installs the driver correctly, use 'ndiswrapper -l' which should read "bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present"
3) create 'ifcfg-wlan0' file using vi in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
("vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0")
it should contain these lines of text:

TYPE=Wireless
MODE=Auto
ONBOOT=yes
DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp

4) 'vi /etc/modprobe.conf' file and edit, adding the line:
alias wlan0 ndiswrapper
(on a fresh install of Mandrake 10.1 this file was empty)

5) type 'modprobe ndiswrapper'

And THAT should work; to reset your network without restarting the
machine, type into the console:

/rc.d/init.d/network restart

Use the 'iwconfig' tool (located with 'whereis iwconfig' if you are unsure, probably in /sbin or /etc) to determine if the wlan0 is recognized and to get feedback about the hardware. If it reports odd errors, you might have a hardware failure (memory-related)

This worked for me with a TrueMobile1300 installed internally on an INSPIRON 1150.