[ale] help me convert a non-believer

[Brian Pitts]

On 11/13/2009 10:36 AM, Asher Vilensky wrote:
> I finally convinced one of my Windoaz friends to try Linux (he got tired
> of his daughter trashing Vista and he has to deal with it).  Anyway, I
> recommended Mint.  The poor guy is running into problems with the
> wireless recognition.  Here's a quote:
> 
> /Well, I can't get it connected via wireless...wired is fine, and the
> router DHCP list shows it, but it won't connect.../
> 
> /so, I'm reading in the Mint forum and folks are talking about what they
> did to get wireless working on their Dell 1525 which has a Broadcom chip
> that someone only wrote a replacement for back in Sept. And I can't make
> heads or tails of
> it....grrr...http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download...down at the
> Bleeding Edge area, talks about tarballs etc...Be sure you have your
> kernel headers installed first...WTF ?!?!/

He needs to find out exactly which broadcom wifi chip he has. He can do
this with the lscpi command. If it is listed as supported [0] then
likely he just needs to connect to the wired network and install the
package b43-fwcutter. If it is not supported, he'll need to try to
windows driver through ndiswrapper. All of this is documented in the
Ubuntu community documentation. [1]

[0] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Known_PCI_devices
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts