Comments on Ubuntu 9.04 Wireless on Dell Precision M6300, page 1 of 2

what is your service tag number? I have a dell p...

Kenneth · 2009-06-11T15:19:32.746000

what is your service tag number?

I have a dell precision m4400 and I had no problems what so ever.

The particular machine I'm working on here is ...

Steve · 2009-06-11T16:09:30.602000

The particular machine I'm working on here is 1RSCXD1, though I plan to migrate the disk to another machine later. I've checked that wireless isn't disabled in the BIOS.

well, first thing you need to specify when asking ...

Anonymous · 2009-06-11T17:22:39.282000

well, first thing you need to specify when asking for a sollution to this problem is what the wifi hardware is.

second thing is, if when you load the driver for the card you get a message (in dmesg) about it beeing disabled by rfkill ... you can go to /sys/class/rfkill/ find your device there .. name and state are your friends. State 0 is off, 1 is on, 2 is OFF but can't be made on by software, ussually some hardware switch has it off.

@gdamjan: Thanks. I was assuming that readers woul...

Steve · 2009-06-11T18:03:38.167000

@gdamjan: Thanks. I was assuming that readers would realize it's the built-in wireless, and know what that is. lspci tells me:

0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4328 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 03)

Ouch. Generally, wifi should work out of the box ...

Marius Gedminas · 2009-06-11T18:36:44.789000

Ouch.

Generally, wifi should work out of the box (or at least after you click through the "restricted drivers required for full hardware support" thingy that IIRC pops up an icon in your system notification area). But Broadcom is notoriously unfriendly towards Linux users: no documentation, no drivers, no redistributable firmware.

After searching on the official Ubuntu website (help.ubuntu.com), I have the impression that you should have the driver, but not the firmware. You should be able to get the firmware from your Windows driver CD, by using the b43-fwcutter package. Unfortunately there are no clear step-by-step instructions that I could find on that site.

If I were you, I'd plug in a network cable, sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter, and start reading /usr/share/doc/bw43-fwcutter/README.Debian, while loudly cursing Broadcom.

Hey, when I tried that, it offered to download and install the firmware automatically for me. I suggest you try that.

i can confirm wireless working flawlessly for m630...

SpeechLess · 2009-06-29T12:25:30.846000

i can confirm wireless working flawlessly for m6300 with ubuntu 9.04 (kubuntu, to be precise).

go for it.

I simply don't understand how different people...

Steve · 2009-07-07T16:03:48.970000

I simply don't understand how different people's experiences can be so different! By dint of various installations I have got to the stage where the wireless interface is shown as wlan0, but wicd shows no available networks even though there are two access points sitting rght next to the laptop (well, twenty feet away), both clearly visible to my other M6300 which is running (I hate to say) Windows Vista!

Come on, guys, help me escape the clutched of the evil empire! :-)

@yuvalaviel: Are you running 64-bit or 32-bit? Thi...

Steve · 2009-07-07T16:06:07.491000

@yuvalaviel: Are you running 64-bit or 32-bit? This is Ubuntu rather than kubuntu - should that make a difference?

Oh, great. I just rebooted the system and now ther...

Steve · 2009-07-07T16:13:04.999000

Oh, great. I just rebooted the system and now there's no wlan0 any more. This really isn't impressive ...

Well, the 32-bit version I just installed suffers ...

Steve · 2009-07-07T17:29:26.908000

Well, the 32-bit version I just installed suffers from exactly the same problem. What distribution have the people who got this to work out of the box been using?

Something seems very screwy here ...