Lycoris DLX 1.4 on a Dell D600 latptop

Last Updated 2005-05-22

Outstanding things to do

  • Wifi with NDIS on boot up
  • Power savings/speed step
  • Mute and Vol up/down buttons

    With build 234 now available, the last stumbling block to DLX 1.4 on a D600 is getting the NDISWRAPPER to load at boot time. You still have to manually configure the NDISWRAPPER, but after that it is pretty straightforward to get it working.

    I started this project as an exercise to see if I could get Linux on a laptop at work to show the power and stability of Linux versus Windows. I like the resolution of the D600 in Windows, and was able to get the same res in DLX after configuring the correct video card (see below).

    System
    Dell Lattitude D600
    Screen resolution: 1400x1050
    Video card: ATI Radeon Mobility 9000
    NIC: Broadcom BCM5705
    WNIC: Broadcom BCM4306

    Video Settings

    The install did not correctly find my video card. When I used the control center and set the video card to an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9)Lf (AGP) and set the sync values to:
    Horz 31.5 - 90
    Vert 59 - 75
    Then you have to go and change the resolution to 1400 x 1050. After that, everything worked fine.

    Network problems

    The install from CD went fine. I installed the normal CD and the Dev tools (required for building drivers later on).

    As of Jan 22, 2005 with build 217 of DLX 1.4, the bcm5700 driver is now included in the update wizard. This file has been included in the download iso file, so if is probably time to do a clean install of DLX 1.4. If you don't have the latest .iso, you still won't have a bcm5700 driver until you connect to the net and update to biuld 217.

    No longer needed after build 217: No worries, Broadcom has a web site with the drivers needed for this NIC. In fact, they require that the tg3 driver be removed for their driver to work. I have put the drivers here in case the Broadcom site goes away. There is a full README included which is very easy to follow. You must be able to use the command line to install these drivers. I recommend that you either burn this to a CD or put it on your Win drive so you can install it (otherwise you will not have a net connection to install the Broadcom drivers).

    After following the install README, there are a few more steps. These steps are in the README but are included here since the paths are distro dependant:

    su
    cd /usr/src/RedmondLinux
    rpm -bb SPECS/bcm5700.spec
    rpm -ivh RPMS/i386/bcm5700-7.3.5-1.i
    modprobe bcm5700
    exit

    the last step is to add the bcm5700 driver the to the /etc/modules/default file. This should be done at the end of the file. This will load the driver at boot time.

    su
    vi /etc/modules/default
    Add to the bottom of the file:
    bcm5700

    Wireless Lan problems

    The wireless lan is a bigger problem. For some reason, Broadcom does not make the drivers for their wireless chipsets available to be ported to Linux. I have read on other sites that this is because the WiFi radio is completely programmable and if the specs to the register setting were in the open, then hackers could use the WiFi to interfere with police and fire radio frequencies (sounds like urban myth and/or bad design on Braodcom's part, but hey, I'm just repeating what I heard).

    There are 2 ways to get around this problem. There is a fee based driver you can get (www.linuxant.com), or you can use a free NDIS driver that uses the Windows driver code to create a driver. I picked the NDIS path because it is free.

    As of build 215 (or so) the NDISWRAPPER is included in DLX. So if you install the 1.4 CD and use the update wizard to update your system, you wil not need to install the NDISWRAPPER.

    To install the driver with the built-in ndiswrapper, follow these instructions:
    su
    ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf (BCMWL5.SYS needed also)
    ndiswrapper -l # To see if the driver installed
    ndiswrapper -m # To load NDIS automatically
    modprobe ndiswrapper # Install the wrapper iwconfig wlan0 # Currently needs to be done every boot to see WLAN

    I am still trying to figure out how to get the ndiswrapper to load at boot time.

    Boot Time help

    Iris Software Downloads

    Under hardware support there are 2 packages that are useful:
    wifi is a graphical program that shows your connection status and signal strength. When this is installed you start it every login session by
    Flower -> internet -> more -> wireless net settings
    klaptopdaemon is a better battery status than the standard KDE battery status monitor. Once this is installed you just need to log out and log back in to see the status icon. I need to figure out how to remove the KDE one now.

    Other install links

    Google Search
    Knoppix 3.3
    Fedora Core 2
    Fedora Core 2
    Red Hat 9

    Wireless Lan problems with VPN

    After struggling with a working wlan but not being able to connect to my work VPN I stumbed across this piece of info at http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/cpdc/pjoisha/lvp.html The VPN needs to use port 500. It is strange that the NIC does not have this problem with the VPN though. I can't argue though, because doing the following allwed my VPN connection to work /sbin/iptables -I INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 500 -j ACCEPT