Dell Wireless Question
I am trying to get my wireless working on a Dell Studio Laptop. Does anyone know how I can check to see what driver I am currently using for my wireless if any.
Thank GNU very much for your help.
You can try
sudo lshw -C network
or
nm-tool
Hello. They gave me the fallowing. It keeps saying it is disabled. I keep trying to turn it on, but this is a new laptop and I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. Any suggestions? Thank GNU. *-network DISABLED
description: Wireless interface
product: Centrino Advanced-N 6200
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 35
serial: 00:23:14:aa:5a:e4
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlagn latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn
resources: irq:36 memory:f0500000-f0501fff
NetworkManager Tool
State: connected
- Device: wlan0 ----------------------------------------------------------------
Type: 802.11 WiFi
Driver: iwlagn
State: disconnected
Default: no
HW Address:
Capabilities:
Wireless Properties
WEP Encryption: yes
WPA Encryption: yes
WPA2 Encryption: yes
Wireless Access Points
I think you need a non-free kernel as you can see here that your driver is deblobbed:
announce IWLAGN - "Intel Wireless WiFi Next Gen AGN"
reject_firmware drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl-agn.c
clean_blob drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl-agn.c
clean_kconfig drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/Kconfig 'IWLAGN'
clean_mk CONFIG_IWLAGN drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/Makefile
> I think you need a non-free kernel as you can see here that your
> driver is deblobbed
I'd rather say you need a wifi card which works with free drivers.
Do you know of any inexpensive ones that would work with a Dell Studio? I bought one a long time ago but apparently laptops change as time goes by and it was too big for the slot of my old laptop and my new one too. It plugged into my Grandma's laptop. Thank GNU.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122272&Tpk=WG111
You can get refurbished Netgear WG111's with free shipping for 15 bucks. While only version 3 is on the FSF's foundations website (http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/index_html/net/wireless/index_html/cards.html) I have ordered two of those cards and gotten 1 version 3 and 1 verison 2. Version 2 also works with all free software (have tested it with trisquel and gnewsense).
Edit: This is assuming you live in the United States. I think newegg is only based there. If you live somewhere else in the world you will have to look around.
Yes, it's just a bad habit (I'm a newcomer to completely free distributions). I should have presented things in a different way like "You can use a non-free kernel in order to be able to use the non-free firmware. But that means using an other distribution and going against the really free software you want to support and defend by using Trisquel. Or you can change your hardware for a hardware that works with a free firmware and a free driver and then support manufacturers that permit the usage of free software."
And all this means you have to check if your hardware has really free drivers before buying it.
It could be useful to have a web page on Trisquel's site with a list of free (or not free) wifi cards for helping trisquel users buying laptops, since in my opinion Wifi drivers and Wifi firmwares are actually the most critical point of hardware compatibility in all the free distributions...