# Dell Latitude 600 Wireless Question

## Rwilson

My father has shown interest in installing Gentoo on his laptop. However, he is unsure as to whether his wireless access will work. His laptop is a Dell Latitude 600, and the wireless card is installed internally within the laptop. It shows up in the Win2000 device manager as both Broadcom 570x Gigabit Integrated Controller and as Dell Truemobile 1300 W-Lan MiniPCI Card. Can anyone inform me both as to whether this card is supported and as to how one configures it within Gentoo? All help appreciated!

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## Jefklak

The truemobile is NOT supported. There have been massive protests, but they are simply not releasing any drivers for this wireless card and backporting seems to be too complicated.... 

I don't know about the other card, check http://www.linux-wlan.com/linux-wlan/ - there's a list with supported cards available. (A whole bunch, needless to say). The broadcom 570x card is a network card right? I think that one works but the module is a bit buggy. i'm on broadcom 440 and that one works quite well (bc44 module) - if you would like to get some more info, try Google...

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## hanzotutu

Mine D600 has the same configuration as your father's, Broadcom 570x Gigabit Integrated Controller and as Dell Truemobile 1300 W-Lan MiniPCI Card. They work smoothly in gentoo. The broadcom 570x is supported 

in kernel (2.6.x). It's called tg3. The truemobile 1300 need ndiswrapper.

Check this website http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

There is also a How-to in this forum for setting up ndiswrapper.

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## Jefklak

hanzotutu, I tought the truemobile 1300 wasn't supported... It seems it's not and NdisWrapper is yust a workaround to get it working by loading windows API drivers... Does that work good enough? Are you experiencing any lag or difficulties? Could you call us in general how you installed it and got it working? that would be awesome! thanks  :Smile: 

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## Rwilson

hanzotutu: Where would this "tg3" option be within the kernel config menu? And to repeat Jefklak, could you give us some info on how you installed it?

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## Jefklak

*bump*

I still would like to know how you did it hanzi, that would also help others...

Maybe someone else also managed to get the drivers working?

I tried without any luck...  :Sad: 

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## eee

I've got the TM1300 working just fine on my 600m.  I installed from the source, located at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/.  Install instructions are available in the source code.  I didn't need anything much beyond the instructions in there to get it working.  I haven't tried any benchmarks - I was just happy to get rid of the PCMCIA card.   I have not experienced any loss of connectivity and the speeds are enough to stream MythTV (though 802.11b was good enough for that as well).

I've been using ndiswrapper since 0.1, I think, so I don't recall how I got the .sys and .inf files.  I seem to recall using wine to extract them from the self-extracting .exe supplied by Dell, but it's been a while.

I just remembered that I needed to enable wireless stuff in the BIOS.  I don't know if it's off by default or if I had disabled it at some point, but install won't work unless it's enabled.

There's also a gentoo HOWTO which looks good, but is written for the 0.4 version.  It's at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125627

If you're experiencing more specific problems, try the ndiswrapper forum or post your error messages here.

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## hanzotutu

 *Rwilson wrote:*   

> hanzotutu: Where would this "tg3" option be within the kernel config menu? And to repeat Jefklak, could you give us some info on how you installed it?

 

```

Device Drivers  --->

Networking support  --->

Ethernet (1000 Mbit)  --->

...

<*> Broadcom Tigon3 support

...

```

```

lspci -v 

...

0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5702 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 02)

        Subsystem: Dell Computer Corporation: Unknown device 8126

        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11

        Memory at faff0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable)

        Capabilities: [40] PCI-X non-bridge device.

        Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 2

        Capabilities: [50] Vital Product Data

        Capabilities: [58] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/3 Enable

...

```

As for ndiswrapper, eee has said everything.

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## Jefklak

Thank you guys!

I will try this right away  :Smile: 

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## Rwilson

Excellent! As soon as I can convince my father to begin the install, I will try this info out. Thanks for the hlep

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