Linux driver issues with Dell Latitude D620

[RyzenMaster.sys]

Dell Latitude D620
C2D T5500
1.5gb ram
240gb SSD

I have Lubuntu installed alongside XP.

I cannot connect to Wifi with linux, however it works fine under XP. This laptop uses a Broadcom 4311 card and I have enabled the proprietary drivers for it, however Lubuntu does not see Wifi ability at all.

Also I am having issues with audio. If i plug in headphones, they do play, but audio never stops coming out of the built in speakers, even though they show as an unavailable audio device with headphones plugged in.

Any ideas what to try? I do not know a ton about linux.

 

[Easy Rhino]

Hrm... without spending a ton of time on it, try from the command line issuing lspci which should list a bunch of devices the linux kernel knows about. See what it detects for your wireless card and your soundcard.

 

[Frick]

Yeah... Some (and honestly a lot of) Linux distros doesn't play nice with older hardware. I seem to recall having to add additional repos (or something like it) to get WiFi working on some laptops from that era.

 

[RyzenMaster.sys]

I have run lshw before and didn't get much help, but maybe someone here will be able to interpret it better. Here is a screenshot of device manager under XP. Ill reboot into Linux and get screenshots of LSHW.

Here is what lshw showed

 

[Easy Rhino]

I assume you read through this guide?

WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx - Community Help Wiki

You may have better luck with different drivers than the proprietary.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

If Ubuntu doesn't work for your Wi-Fi then most other Linux distros probably won't work either. My advice would be to give it a try with NetBSD. It has in some cases better wi-fi driver support than Linux and it supports a surprising amount of hardware.

Your processor is also very weak. It might be worth using something like PekWM, Openbox, i3, or AwesomeWM instead of LXDE. Because although LXDE is light, your CPU is very weak and the windows managers I suggest are going to perform better on your hardware.