Networking: Nothing But Trouble

I finally have wired, wireless, and modem networking. But it was a pain in the ass.

From reading around about these machines it seems that Dell switches hardware vendors fairly frequently, especially for the networking components; I didn't have a choice of wireless cards or modems when I bought the machine, but other people with Inspiron 5100s have different hardware that works. So don't despair. Besides, probably all the hardware will be officially supported before long.

Built-in Network Interface Card: Driver Available

The integrated ethernet card is a Broadcom 4401. It is supported, but not in the kernel; you have to find and build the driver yourself. The driver's name is bcm4400. Version 1.0.1 of the driver is a package in Debian unstable (though it's just source, you still have to build it); I am running version 2.0.0 and more recent versions may exist. Once I knew the name of the driver Google found it without much trouble.

The driver is able to tell when a network cable is plugged in (it says things like ``NIC is up! NIC is down. Darn.'') but I can't figure out how to make plugging in the cable trigger running dhclient (for DHCP) or otherwise configuring the network. There is a package called laptop-net that is supposed to make this easy but I haven't learned to use it yet. I'll post instructions when I do.

To build the driver you have to install the kernel source, and it has to have a copy of modversions.h. This file didn't appear in my tree until after I had configured and made the kernel. But of course you want a custom kernel anyway. They boot faster.

Built-in NIC Update 19 July 2004: in-kernel driver exists.

The Broadcom driver has been integrated into the main kernel source as of version 2.4.22. The in-kernel driver is called b44. To get DHCP to work correctly I had to name this module in /etc/default/laptop-net.

Built-in Wireless Network Card: Unsupported

This is a Broadcom 4320 and is apparently unsupported in linux, much to the dismay of many. I read a report that the bcm4400 driver can somehow be convinced to operate the network card. I also read a report that Venus is populated by bat people who vote Republican. You have to be careful about what you read.

I have heard that there is now (July 2004) a driver available but I've decided I prefer the PCMCIA card.

Orinoco Silver Wireless Network Card: Driver Available

I bought an Orinoco Silver card by Proxim and am using it to post this message. I picked this because I had heard it was well-supported; however Proxim has changed the chipset to something called Hermes-2, which the kernels' hermes.o driver can't handle yet.

The card is

prompt> /sbin/cardctl ident
Socket 0:
  product info: "Agere Systems", "Wireless PC Card Model 0110", "", ""
  manfid: 0x0156, 0x0003
  function: 6 (network)

and I found the driver at http://greenblaze.com. I'll post a copy soon or when prodded.

Built-in Modem: Driver Available

The modem is a Conexant D480: lspci says

00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 24c6 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Generic])
        Subsystem: Conexant: Unknown device 5422

Go to http://linuxant.com/drivers, get the HSF (softmodem) driver, and follow the instructions.

Networking Drivers

These are the networking drivers that I had to find on the web. Of course, you are finding them on the Web, too. But this should make searching easier.

Or it would if it weren't incomplete. If you can't find one of these anywhere else and I haven't gotten around to posting them send a frustrated message to rob@utk.edu.

• Broadcom driver bcm4400
• Conexant driver http://linuxant.com/drivers get the HSF (softmodem) driver
• Agere Systems' driver for Hermes-2 chipsets: http://greenblaze.com my driver is wlags49_h2_cs