Archive for the ‘troubleshooting’ Category

Broadcom Wireless Drivers for Linux

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

On 2008-10-25, I wrote:

• (For Linux users) Configuration only supports Broadcom-based Dell wireless cards, which don’t have open source drivers, and Broadcom’s proprietary drivers work poorly with ndiswrapper²
² Broadcom is currently developing open source drivers that should be released soon: http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2008/10

That was (as far as I know) correct, but I would like to add something: proprietary drivers for the 802.11 Linux sta, which work for Broadcom BCM4311‐, BCM4312‐, BCM4321‐, and BCM4322‐based wireless cards. This coverage includes the Dell‐branded wireless cards that shipped with the company’s Studio 15 and Studio 17 models when I bought my Studio 15 (it appears they now ship with Intel‐made cards). These drivers are supposedly kernel‐version‐independent and distribution‐independent (of course, verification is difficult because they’re proprietary). 32‐bit and 64‐bit ‐based architectures are supported. Dhananjay Singh wrote a brief tutorial that I used, resulting in working wireless card drivers for Gnu–Linux for my Studio 15. I also wrote:

Right now, I would recommend it to Windows users and Linux users who do not mind the headphones and wireless issues. Chances are I will excitedly advertize it to Linux users in a few months.

That month has come; now I would recommend it. If this worked or did not work for you, comment!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in linux, troubleshooting | No Comments »

Invalid MBR Pointers

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

I recently had an issue with my Dell Studio 15 laptop. My 250GB hard drive is dual-booting Feodora 9 and Windows Vista (my system regrettably shipped with the latter). I wanted to create an encrypted filesystem for secure data, so I ran Gparted (while logged into Gnome) to create a suitable partition. Unfortunately, the beloved partition editor could not manipulate my ext4 partitions, and my 55GB NTFS partition may become full thanks to video games and bloated software. So I decided to shrink my ext3 boot partition to a more reasonable size. When I accidentally shrunk it from the left, Gparted produced two contradicting error messages. Still not knowing what had happened, I chose to trust the first message and followed its instructions: do not mount and reboot immediately. There was no reboot. Instead, when my hard drive booted, I received a screen with one word: GRUB. My MBR was now pointing to an invalid sector—Grub no longer started there. After realising my error, I booted to a Grub CD and ran the commands suggested here. I was not sure which partition held Grub after the failed partition edit, so I ran the command:

find /boot/grub/stage1

It returned nothing, so I tried variations: /boot/grub, /boot, /stage1, /grub. The last one worked; In Fedora 9, Anaconda installs Grub to /grub, not /boot/grub. Then I ran:

setup (hd0,2)

My system booted and everything was content. Dell Studios have slot-loading CD drives. Not noticing the eject symbol symbol on my just above my F12 key, I spent most of my time trying to remove the CD that was in my drive when my system failed in more forceful ways.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in troubleshooting | No Comments »