[CentOS] Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility - mini-pci wireless card 1390

[Barry Brimer]

Quoting Andrew Allen <andy.allen at virgin.net>:

> On Sun, 2007-11-18 at 19:41 -0600, Barry Brimer wrote:
>
> > I have a Dell laptop that I believe has the same card.  The CentOS 5
> > kernel did not appear to support it, but the RHEL 5.1 (and subsequently
> > upon its release) the CentOS 5.1 kernel does support it.  You will need to
> > drop the firmware into /lib/firmware .. I believe this is a bcm43xx card.
> >
> > Barry
>
> Thanks Barry,
> In view of what you say about CentOS 5.1 supporting this card, I think
> I'm going to wait until it's released - hope that won't be too long. Any
> other possible solutions (eg like using ndiswrapper) look far too
> complicated for a linux newbie like me!  I hope that I'll be able to
> update the kernel without having to do a complete re-install. In the
> meantime I'm just going to have to use MS Windows XP (I have dual-boot
> on this laptop) for any wireless networking.

I was using ndiswrapper for this card until RHEL 5.1's kernel picked it up.  I
noticed that it now found an 'eth1' interface that didn't exist before. 
ndiswrapper does work, but has somewhat occasional crashes most likely due to
RHEL's 4k stack size that is not really compatible with ndiswrapper.  I agree,
you should wait until the CentOS 5.1 kernel comes out because assuming you and
I have the same card, all you need is the firmware .. and it will work without
further issue.

Barry