[linux-laptop] Dell 1390 aka BCM43xx WLAN on RHEL5/Dell Latitude D620

[Quinton Hoole]

Hi Guys

I'm struggling to get the builtin wireless adaptor on my Dell Latitude
D620 to work correctly under Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5).
Can anyone offer any advice?

lspci tells me that I have this device inside:

=== snip ===
$ lspci | grep Wireless
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN
Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)
=== /snip ===

A bit of googling tells me that this requires the Broadcom bcm43xx
device drivers which appear to be loaded (I did this manually using
modprobe bcm43xx):

=== snip ===
[qrh at quinton-lap5 ~]$ lsmod | grep bcm43xx
bcm43xx               413121  0
ieee80211softmac       33985  1 bcm43xx
ieee80211              33417  2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac
=== /snip ===

And dmesg seems happy enough:

=== snip ===
$ dmesg
ieee80211: 802.11 data/management/control stack, git-1.1.13
ieee80211: Copyright (C) 2004-2005 Intel Corporation
<jketreno at linux.intel.com>
bcm43xx driver
=== /snip ===

But apparently this is not doing the trick, as iwconfig doesn't see the
device:

=== snip ===
$ sudo iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

tun0      no wireless extensions.
=== /snip ===

Some further googling tells me that this driver may be broken, and
ndiswrapper is a better route to follow:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092

... but I'd rather not dirty my RHEL5 install unnecessarily with
ndiswrapper, if there's a 'cleaner' solution.

Incidently, my kernel version is:

$ uname -a
Linux quinton-lap5 2.6.18-8.1.4.el5 #1 SMP Fri May 4 22:15:13 EDT 2007
i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Thanks in advance...

Q

PS:  Please cc: quinton at hoole.biz on any replies, as I only receive
daily digests of this mailing list.
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