Hi there
If you are an Ubuntu’er on Dell 1501 with Broadcomm wireless card, you would definitely have gone through the pain of making wifi work. My first Ubuntu version was 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). I like Ubuntu. But, it was a nightmare to get wifi working. There were no drivers for Broadcomm card and making NDISWrapper work was not trivial for a Linux amateur. I hated to upgrade to any newer version of Ubuntu because it would break it and I had to fix it again. This continued till Hardy (8.04). In Intrepid (8.10), I realized that Ubuntu now came with a driver for Broadcomm cards and “ping” in terminal worked. But I still was not able to browse with my browser. In one of the forums, I read NetworkManager does not work well with this driver (I don’t know if this is true, but I was already tired of trying to make wifi work). I removed NetworkManager and installed Wicd and it detected the driver and worked like a charm. I was a happy camper until I got the desire to try out Ubuntu server edition.
I downloaded and installed Jaunty (9.04) server edition and again, ‘ping’ in the terminal worked but not the NetworkManager. It simply said ‘Wireless Networks Device not managed”. After some googling, I finally found out that its because, by default, NetworkManager is not configured to manage the wireless card.
This is what I did to fix this issue:
In the terminal type
sudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf
The file nm-system-settings.conf will open in the editor. Now change “managed=false” to “managed=true”. Save and close the editor. After this, in the terminal, type
sudo killall nm-system-settings
NetworkManager will detect the wireless card and everything will just work. The feeling of making wifi to work in Dell 1501 so easily is magical.
Have fun
Raj
