Saturday, September 15, 2012

Ubuntu from USB drive and wireless support in Dell Inspiron 1545

Nowadays I install OS from USB whenever I can. Most of the time the installation would be straightforward but Dell and its Broadcom wireless cards are still a problem just because of licencing issues.

Today I helped a family member with his Inspiron 1545 and here is the story of that Journey"
  1. Insert USB with Ubuntu
  2. Start the "Additional Drivers" application (Search for "Driver" from "Dash Home" application, the first icon with the Ubuntu Logo).
  3. The "Broadcom STA wireless driver" was found in my case. Select "Acrivate", I got:
    Sorry. installation of this driver failed. Please have a look at the log files for details: /var/log/jockey.log A quick look of the jockey.log revealed: 2012-09-15 19:30:56,301 ERROR: Package fetching failed: Failed to fetch cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120823.1)]/pool/main/d/dkms/dkms_2.2.0.3-1ubuntu3_all.deb Unable to stat the mount point /media/cdrom/ - stat (2: No such file or directory) Sorry. installation of this driver failed. Please have a look at the log files for details: /var/log/jockey.log
    A quick look of the jockey.log revealed:
    2012-09-15 19:30:56,301 ERROR: Package fetching failed: Failed to fetch cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120823.1)]/pool/main/d/dkms/dkms_2.2.0.3-1ubuntu3_all.deb Unable to stat the mount point /media/cdrom/ - stat (2: No such file or directory)
  4. Of course the problem here is that a cdrom is expected but we are using a usb device. Take a look at /media directory and you should see the name of the USB device (In my case UBUNTU) so a simple symlink will help:
    sudo ln -s /media/UBUNTU /media/cdrom
    
  5. Now you should be able to activate the driver now as explained above
  6. Once the driver is installed delete the shortcut we created:
    sudo rm /media/cdrom
    
  7. You might want to restart and use the fn+f2 combination to get to the BIOS, select wireless and disable the wireless hardware switch to avoid wireless disconnections.

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