Dell Inspiron N5110 Wireless setup under Linux ( Tested on CentOs 6.3)

Ubuntu normally comes with lot of drivers installed. So no one will have to install drivers manually for their home usage. But when it comes to Fedora, CentOs, RedHat, Debian etc etc wireless wont be pre installed. You will have to download Linux drivers manually and configure the system to use it. Method described under this post will work for most of Broadcom wireless devices under many Linux versions. OK Let's get started.

This post will cover the Driver installation of DELL Inspiron n5110 Laptop under CentOs 6.3 .

First download Linux driver from Brodcom.

http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_112.tar.gz

Then download and install kernel-devel package and gcc.

yum install kernel-devel gcc

Now in shell go to the hybrid-postsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_112.tar.gz

then unzip the tar file.

tar xzf hybrid-postsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_112.tar.gz

After that go to hybrid-postsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_112 directory.

Now build the driver as a Linux Loadable kernel module

make clean
make

if any error occured, try

make API=WEXT

or

make API=CFG80211

Then it will create some files including wl.ko

Now it is time to load the driver

to do that,

modprobe lib80211

insmod wl.ko

Let the system scan wireless device.
This will load the driver for current session.If you want to load the driver in bootup follow the instructions given below.

cp wl.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless 


Now you'r Drivers should work properly.