My beautiful fiancée recently purchased a new Dell Inspirion 1525. This specific version of the 1525 comes preloaded with Windows Vista. Dell sells another version named the Inspirion 1525n that comes preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10. My future Father-in-law and I assumed since Dell sold the 1525 as both a Vista and Ubuntu version, a switch to the Hardy Heron would be a breeze. This assumption, for the most part, was true. The main issue we had was with the Broadcom WLAN driver. Between the two of us, we probably tried around 40 drivers and many configurations to no avail. Finally after about a week of messing around with it, I found the solution:
Open up Terminal and follow these commands:
Blacklist the bcm43xx driver:
lisa@ubuntu:~$ echo ‘blacklist bcm43xx’ | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Install ndiswrapper and dependencies:
lisa@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndisgtk
Follow this link: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe and save the .exe file.
Unzip the file:
lisa@ubuntu:~$ cd desktop
lisa@ubuntu:~$ unzip R174291.exe
lisa@ubuntu:~$ cabextract R174291.exe
Open the folder that was just created and open folder DRIVER_US. Locate bcmwl5.inf
Use ndiswrapper to install bcmwl5.inf
lisa@ubuntu:~$ sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
On my fiancées’ computer, the blue wifi light instantly turned on and the WLAN worked instantly. You may or may not have to reboot to get it working.