Dell Latitude 131L

Installing Debian 4.0 (Etch)

Install with a boot option of pci=nomsi

I.e. 'install pci=nomsi'

See Installing Ubuntu 6.10 on Dell Latitude 131L

-- Frank Dean - 29 Apr 2007

Update: Looks like the above link is now broken and I can't remember what the issue was - probably related to getting suspend/hibernate working. See the The MSI Driver Guide HOWTO for more information.

-- Frank Dean - 20 Aug 2011

Broadcom Wireless (BCM4311)

These notes refer to getting a Broadcom BCM4311 wireless card working on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze).

Whilst the b43 driver works with some wireless routers, it may not work with all. I had to use the wl (a.k.a. STA) drivers instead, otherwise it would not see the network at all. See the Linux Kernel documenation for b43 for detailed information on the drivers, and also the Debian Wiki for bcm43xx cards for instructions in installing the drivers.

wl

After installing the broadcom-sta-common package, /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf blacklisted the b44 module, which stopped the Ethernet card working. Commenting out the line blacklisting b44 allowed the Ethernet card to work (after rebooting). It didn't seem to conflict with the wl module as the package configuration suggests.

Additionally there were issues with old entries in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which caused the wireless device to be renamed to eth0/eth1 due to an old entry that related to using ndiswrapper. It may be necessary to delete 70-persistent-net.rules (backing it up somewhere safe first), reboot to cause it to be re-created with the correct entries. In this instance, it created the wireless device eth1. Edit 70-persistent-net.rules and changing it to wlan0 fixed it.


-- Frank Dean

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