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The Avatar of Time

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 226

[SOLVED] Dell Inspiron 1721 Broadcom 4312 dhcpcd times out

Hello,

I am installing Arch64 on a laptop for the first time. Everything is going good, apart from the wireless card.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1721 with a Broadcom 4312 802.11a/b/g wireless card in it.

I have installed broadcom-wl, bcm43-fwcutter, and b43-firmware. I've rebooted as well.

I have been using these guides:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_BCM4312

After I 'modprobe b43' my card will show up with 'iwconfig' as wlan0.

I then do:

ifconfig wlan0 up

iwlist wlan0 scan

iwconfig wlan0 essid "linksys"

Which all seem to work ok. However when I:

dhcpcd wlan0

the connection eventually times out.

I've never setup wireless before, so I'm completely lost on what the issue is. Any help would be appreciated.

Last edited by The Avatar of Time (2009-03-09 03:21:54)

The Avatar of Time

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 226

Re: [SOLVED] Dell Inspiron 1721 Broadcom 4312 dhcpcd times out

Okay, I have made a bit of progress.

It seems that I mispelled essid. After correcting that dhcpcd works.

However, I still can't access the internet. I can connect to the router though. So I know that the wireless card is working, but for some reason it won't connect to the internet.

I tried using an IP address for a site instead of a domain name, but that didn't help.

I read a thread earlier today about a very similar issue to this, but at the time it didn't concern me, and now I can't manage to find it again........

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Thanks.

Previously this laptop had XP on it, and the wireless card worked fine with the router and internet, so it shouldn't be a security issue in the router I wouldn't think.

Last edited by The Avatar of Time (2009-03-08 23:11:11)

The Avatar of Time

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 226

Re: [SOLVED] Dell Inspiron 1721 Broadcom 4312 dhcpcd times out

Well I've solved it.

This line was the source of all my troubles:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "linksys"

It turns out that there should NOT be "" around linksys, it should be like this:

iwconfig wlan0 essid linksys

So for anyone else messing with one of these laptops or just the wireless card:

The Dell Inspiron 1721 with Broadcom 3412 802.11a/b/g wireless card in it runs perfectly on Linux, and there is no need for ndiswrappers.

The wireless card would of worked pretty much out of the box had I not made the little typo.

Sound works out of the box. The touchpad works (I'm sure that's common for most laptops).

As of now I can't find anything that doesn't work with it.

It also runs infinitely faster with GNOME than it did with Windows XP

The Avatar of Time

Member

Registered: 2008-01-11

Posts: 226

Re: [SOLVED] Dell Inspiron 1721 Broadcom 4312 dhcpcd times out

Well, I guess it wasn't working perfectly, after I restarted it would not reconnect to the internet.

However I found the fix to that problem here:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 80#p512780

Which basically involved adding the following to /etc/rc.d/network:

wi_up()
{
    eval iwcfg="\$wlan_${1}"
    [ "$iwcfg" = "" ] && return 0

    /usr/sbin/iwconfig $iwcfg
    /sbin/ifconfig $1 up         # this is the line I added
    [[ -z "$WIRELESS_TIMEOUT" ]] && WIRELESS_TIMEOUT=2
    sleep $WIRELESS_TIMEOUT

Now it runs.....more or less......perfect.

Hopefully this will help someone else. Good luck.