midtoad's blog

Wireless LAN on Acer Aspire 3613WLMi

Today I picked up a new notebook from Staples to try out. It's an Acer Aspire 3613WLMi. This is a post about how I got the wireless LAN working on Linux. It didn't take that long, actually, but definitely was more work than on Windows.

For the techies, it's got a Pentium M370 CPU running at 15GHz with a 400 MHz front-side bus and 1MB of L2 cache. There's a 15.4" WXGA Crystalbrite TFT LCD which is indeed quite bright and shiny, a 60GB HDD, a DVD+R and double-layer DVD+/-RW drive, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and 802.11B/G wireless LAN. It's also got 4 USB slots and 1 PCMCIA slot, RCA video input, audio in and out.

This notebook cost $749 Cdn. and came equipped with Windows XP Home, but I'm more interested in running it under Linux (I already have XP running on a desktop PC, and Mac OS X running on a MacMini.). I especially want to see if the wireless LAN will work under Linux, since a reason for buying it is to be able to work when my wife has taken over the desk in our condo.

I booted up the notebook with a Knoppix 4.0.2 Live CD, and it didn't detect the WLAN chip. It did detect everything else, though.

I also tried SuSe 10.0 Live CD, and while it didn't activate the WLAN, it could tell that there was something there with a 4318 model number. (The WLAN chip is a Broadcom 4318). SuSe didn't detect my sound card, either, and the default size of all of the system administration widgets was larger than my screen, making it a challenge to find the "ok" button in some cases.

Next up, I tried the Ubuntu 5.10 Live CD. It detected the sound card, but not the WLAN card, but I was hopeful about this distro based on the comments of http://yuri.at/go/amd64; I noted that his notebook has the same model of WLAN chip as mine. He has a complete write-up on what he did, so I encourage you to read it. A few difficulties:

I got a driver for my notebook from Acer. Actually, in the folder for my model number, there was a message advising to look under travelmate 2640 (? check that model no. ). I downloaded the Windows drivers and inside the zip file found a 80211bg.zip file, which contained the bcmwl5.inf file that Yuri mentions.

Then I ran into a hitch. Naturally Yuri's note doesn't describe any problems! Firest off, the Ubuntu Live CD doesn't have ndiswrapper available. BUT you can run 'aptitude', which provides access to the repository of software stored on the CD. There is a module called ndiswrapper-utils that you can install.

Next, when I ran the command

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl.inf

I got a message:

bcmwl5  invalid driver!

It seems as though the driver on the Acer site for the Travelmate won't work. Perhaps there are others there that will?

Though the driver is invalid, it is still installed. To uninstall it, use the -e option and leave off the .inf of the filename:

ndiswrapper -e bcmwl5

Next I went to the http://ndiswrapper.sf.net site and looked in the extensive list of cards and laptops. Instead of looking under A for Acer, I looked under B for Broadcom, and found this entry, which solved my problem:

Card: Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) in HP COMPAQ V2415LA with Debian sid, ndiswrapper 1.5

• pciid: 14e4:4318
• Driver: bcmwl5.inf, BCMWL5.SYS, from
• [ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp30001-30500/SP30379.exe]

I downloaded the driver from the HP site and ran the executable on a Windows box. I was encouraged by an installation note saying that it supported more than one type of chip. I re-ran the ndiswapper installation command, and this time I didn't get an error message!

You can use Ubuntu's handy like network applet (top-right of the desktop) to set the network configuration for wlan0 once you get it all working.

Hope this is enough to get you going - this blog posting was typed up on the new laptop running Ubuntu Linux and using the WLAN card! If you came across this post from a search engine, click on the logo below to visit the Tuxmobil site for information on other laptop models' WLAN capabilities under Linux.

[tuxmobil.org/acer.html]