I have a Dell Inspiron 1545. I recently bought a new hard drive and cage to go with it so I can easily swap in and out between Windows XP and Linux.
So I put my new HD in and booted the Linux Mint Maya disc. The wireless was not recognized. I went ahead and installed Linux Mint in full and then set about trying to resolve this issue.
Turns out I had to install a driver. I did have to be connected to the internet though (I used my mobile broadband but a LAN connection will also do) and then run the following commands in a terminal window:
sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-lpphy-installer
I did try to download all the packages so in future I would not need an internet connection but one of these scripts calls an external web site so I have no idea how to modify the installer to tell it to look locally instead. That's an exercise for the future!
