wireless modem driver

I admit it, I am a complete beginner at Linux. But I liked the idea of a small efficient operating system, so I thought I would give it a try.

I have put Pendrivelinux (a Mandriva derivative) onto a USB stick and it fired up fine with what looks like pretty much everything I need in at least 3 different flavours in less than a gigabyte of memory. Quite a change from Windows.

But.

I have a wireless modem and I have not been able to get Linux to talk to it. The wireless configuration says it "cannot find bcmwl5.sys on the Windows system". Well, bcmwl5.sys is definitely there in the Windows system directory.

So, my question is, where does linux think the Windows system is?

Thanks a lot,
Geoffrey

Ok, a little confusion.

Can you tell us what sort of modem you are using, also, "how" are you trying to use the bcmwl5 driver?

You can make use of the Windows system driver using the NDIS wrapper, however there tend to be native and far better ways of getting connected these days,

If you want to take this approach, you could have a look at this howto, although for some network cards, as I say it may be obsolete.

(for example, my 5 year old laptop had wireless networking on-board and works out- of- the- box on Ubuntu, and I use a 3G wireless modem for mobile broadband which also works without any messing around)

Thanks for wading to try and help Gareth, I appreciate that.

The computer is a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop, with a Dell Wireless WLAN Mini PCI modem in it.

From the Pendrivelinux penquin, I go to "Configure Wireless Network". The computer thinks for a microsecond or two, and comes back with "Firmware Files required for this Device" and then gives two options. "Use my Windows Partition" or "Select File".

Choosing the "Use my Windows Partition" option, I get "Unable to find "bcmwl5.sys" on your Windows system!"

Choosing the "Select File" option leads me into NDIS wrapper land and several pages of C programming. As I say, I am a total newbie at Linux and have never programmed in C or its various successors, so this is a road down which I am loathe to travel down at this stage.

It would appear that the configuration program will do the work for me, if only it could find the file bcmwl5.sys on my "Windows system". Hence my original question.

Any help would sure be appreciated.

Mmm, this looks like a specific "Mandriva" feature that I'm not familiar with. You will find that the major distributions all do things slightly differently in some area and networking is just one of those areas.

I would be inclined to try a copy of Ubuntu's live CD as this uses a different kernel and driver set (and probably different versions of the associated applications). I'm not sure which package is doing this or you, but Ubuntu uses Redhat's "Network Manager" application, and if Mandriva are not using this, it's definitely something worth trying.

Ubuntu comes with a package called b43-fwcutter which is designed to extract the files you need from various locations, so I'm guessing this would solve your problems if you tried a full-on install ...

I'd be interested to know how old your copy of the Mandriva distro is, all the indications I'm seeing are that this "shouldn't" be a problem on this type of chipset on newer versions of the major distributions ..

Probably way too late (!) but generally Dell laptops are not "great", unless of course you can get one with Linux pre-installed .. but then I've had lots of problems with Windows on Dell's too ..

Just as a matter of interest I've had an NEC laptop for about 5 years now which cost me about £450 (which laptops were more expensive) has always worked flawlessly with Linux. That said I'm quite tempted by the new ASUS Eee machines ...

Hello Gareth

Thanks for your thoughts - I will chew on them and see where they lead.

Great website by the way. Well designed, interesting and useful. What more could you want...?

Regards,

Geoffrey

>What more could you want...?

Lots .. working on it .. ;-)