Problem with very old Dell XPS M1330

[stripes theotoky]

Hello to all,

Have a problem with a very old Dell XPS M1330.  The box is 12 years old (2008) and runs Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.  It has only been used recently to play frozen bubble as it has a very good keyboard.  

The problem:
It does not pick the wifi.  The switch on the side of the box doesn't seem to be working.
I have checked the BIOS and both wifi and blue tooth seem to be turned on there (ENABLED).

I tried iwconfig which listed the following interfaces and that nothing was wifi capable

lo
eth1
vboxnet0

I tried
sudo ifconfig vboxnet0 up
and
sudo ifconfig vboxnet0 down

which show I can turn the vboxnet0 interface on and off. With it turned on I again tried
iwconfig and still there are no wifi capable interfaces.

This happens with the Ubuntu that is on this box and with Mint 17 booted from a USB key.

Any ideas?  Is the wifi internal card dead?  old system?

Thanks in advance, 

Take care and be safe

J.

--

Stripes Theotoky

-37 .713869
145.050562

 

[Duncan Gray]

Hi,

Have you tried sniffing the Wifi from another device and seeing if there is any layer 2 traffic from the troublesome one?

It would be helpful if you know the MAC address for it.

Regards Duncan 

Sent from my iPhone

On 14 Apr 2020, at 19:46, 'stripes theotoky' via mlug-au <mlu...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Darren Wurf]

You may need to load a kernel module before the wifi device will appear. Try to find out the wifi chip in that model (lspci can help here)

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[Richard C]

I've seen a dead wifi card in a Dell laptop of a similar (although later) vintage. A $15 off-brand replacement worked a treat (although the antenna pins flipped sides which made me stretch the antenna wire somewhat).

I had one of the those M1330... They were awesome. I went through two or three motherboards thanks to the Nvidia series 88XX debacle. Eventually, it failed after the extended, extended warranty and I broke it down for parts on the spot.

Good times.

Richard

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[Richard C]

The M1330 was notable for being nominally supported running Ubuntu, by Dell. In theory, it's about the only laptop that shouldn't need this sort of messing about. Obviously, it may need such messing about anyway.

7.10! Woo! https://blog.dell.com/en-us/ubuntu-7-10-on-the-xps-m1330-ubuntu-coming-to-customers-in-spain/

Richard

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[Keith Bainbridge]

But ubuntu has an add firmware option built into one of the software manager apps.  Didn't it exist in ubuntu 10? I'd have thought so. 

Keith BAINBRIDGE

keit...@gmail.com

+61447 667 468

Sent from my Apad

--

[Michael Pope]

Have you tried the latest Ubuntu via a live cd just to test that the
WIFI works?

--
Mick

[stripes theotoky]

Thanks for all the suggestions.  Will try and look at each one of them.

Problem is with connection speeds of 3.28 download and 0.54 upload there is very little I can do.

Take care

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Stripes Theotoky

-37 .713869
145.050562

 

[stripes theotoky]

Thanks for your help so far in sorting this out.

Plainly the computer doesn't know it has a wifi card as it doesn't show up in

lspci

or

sudo lshw -C network

output of these commands below.
So the problem seems to be one of the following:
1). It is turned off in the bios even though it appears to be turned on.
2). The card is dead.
3). The switch is dead.

What is the next step?

The computer was bought in the UK with Linux pre-installed and everything did work but sometime in the last 8 years wifi stopped working and I never noticed as it was mostly either plugged into the network or used at places that had no internet at all.

lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
03:01.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
03:01.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 12)
03:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
03:01.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev ff)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)

sudo lshw -C network
  *-network
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express
       vendor: Broadcom Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:09:00.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 02
       serial: 00:1d:09:3f:51:27
       capacity: 100MB/s
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion=3.102 firmware=sb v3.04 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair
       resources: irq:29 memory:fe5f0000-fe5fffff
  *-network DISABLED
       description: Ethernet interface
       physical id: 2
       logical name: vboxnet0
       serial: 0a:00:27:00:00:00
       capabilities: ethernet physical
       configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes

[Gary Pope]

I'm thinking - put a USB Wifi stick in .. Had to do that for an old box
I put Mint v19 onto the other day.

Gary

> <mailto:mlug-au%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>.

[Darren Wurf]

I was just thinking the same thing Gaz 👍 what was the hardware you used? Given how old the laptop is, you'd probably need to buy a USB 2.0 compatible one.

Also given this thing is so old, maybe we should be asking what the intended use case is? Perhaps we can suggest a cheap alternative or maybe someone has some spare hardware lying around that can do the same job. I saw in the original post it has a good keyboard for frozen bubble 😁 is WiFi important for this? Or are there more reasons to not use Ethernet?

Cheers,

Darren

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