Dell Inspiron 1525 Problems

Question

Hello.
I just purchased a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Vista Home Premium preinstalled. I wanted to know if there is a way to install a fully working Arch Linux system on it. I tried with 2007.08 CD only to fail at getting the wireless card to work. Dell Inspiron 1525 comes with a Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini Card. I tried installing both the latest vista and xp drivers for this card via ndiswrapper. I thought all was well since I got the message that said that the driver is installed and the device was present. However, when I checked iwconfig, the normal 'wlan0' was not in the list, just 'lo'. Can someone help me with this?
Also, I used a ZenWalk liveCD to test out if I have sound support. It seems like the sound doesn't work either, but that may be because I used an old liveCD. The 1525 comes with a 'SIGMATEL STAC 92XX C-MAJOR HD Audio' or also known as "High Definition Audio 2.0".
I have also learned that although Dell does offer this laptop with Ubuntu installed, they changed the wireless card on the ubuntu version. I don't know if that means anything. Also, I have heard of many who have gotten linux installed on this laptop. I have some experience with linux, but all of that is with a desktop pc. (Used Arch for the longest after trying out Gentoo ^^)
I checked the Ubuntu forums on this matter, and they seem to have a lot of documentation on it, but I am unsure if it will apply to Arch. Does Arch come with the bcm43xx drivers? If it does, then that means I have to blacklist it or something. I really need help.
- Dennis ^^
PS: Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Thanks for all of the replies. I downloaded the newest ISO and tried to get it working again. Well, b43 did not really work as I hoped it would, so I went and used ndiswrapper. To my astonishment, it works. Apparantly, something changed from the 2.6.22 to 2.6.24 kernels that made it so that the ndiswrapper module won't be detected with a broadcom card with the 2.6.22 kernel. This is all a guess, but it kinda makes sense. Only one problem though, I did all of the usual steps to set up the wireless connection... and it can't seem to connect to the internet... I did:
iwconfig wlan0 essid ********
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted **********
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhcpcd wlan0
*I have tried this with other network cards, those on my desktop, and they worked fine.
When I do 'iwlist wlan0 scanning' , I detect all the networks that I expected to see, but it doesn't connect to any of them, which I think is really weird.
I don't really care much for vista, but I miss messing around with a decent CLI, and I will be majoring in Computer Science once I get into college, which would definately include classes on Bash scripting, so I wanted to get a linux install on my laptop since my desktop died. I have experience with Ubuntu, Gentoo (Stage 1 and Stage 3 installs.. Stage 1 was a giant pain and failed the first 4 times), ZenWalk, MEPIS, SuSE, Fedora, Arch, and some others. Of all of these, I liked Arch the best. So, I was really hoping I could get it installed.
Well, it seems I will be stuck with vista for a while... but I must say, it's not AS bad as I thought it would... still slow and all though ^^
@anti-neutrino:
Hello. Dual-booting is tricky stuff in my opinion. I have never done it myself, so I can't really help you there. But, there are plenty of documentation out there on it. According to http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm, DellMediaDirect is installed on a hidden partition. So, I'm guessing that as long as you don't touch that partition, it would still be there. What I think you would have problem with is where to put grub (or lilo). The safest thing to do, I would think, is to place it in a floppy, if you have an external floppy drive, or place grub into a USB Flash drive which you would be able to boot from. I have no idea how to do this in Arch, but I have done it before in SuSE. And as for Vista, as long as you don't touch the vista partition, it should stay the same. The booting is the only problem I can see for you. If the boot loader (grub or lilo) is installed in a separate medium (floppy/USB) then to boot into the linux partition, all you would have to do is boot from the medium, eitherwise, it would boot into Vista (or whatever you have that boots up first) automatically.. that is unless they changed something, and knowing how fast linux is developed, there are a lot of changes, so I'm not really sure if it still works this way.
@Warper:
I don't really mind the sound right now. If I can get internet to work, I know I can solve all the other problems later, as all I need to do is look up how to solve for it. But, yeah I know sound is muted by default in Arch. It's just that with my desktop, sound was automatically detected by other LiveCD's that I was confused when those same LiveCD's couldn't detect it. Again, this might just be that the LiveCD's use an older kernel.
- Dennis ^^
PS: I reinstalled vista and wrote this post in it. T_T
Last edited by skittlehawk (2008-06-06 23:30:16)