I have a Dell Inspiron 1520 with the Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card, one that has given many Linux users big headaches.

After trying many different approaches suggested all over the web, and gathering clues in many Ubuntu forum posts, I finally worked out this solution:

First of all you must check if you have the correct card:

lspci -nn | grep 14e4

Result: 05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI [14e4:4311 (rev 01)]

Then proceed to the first step:

1. blacklist bcm43xx

echo blacklist bcm43xx | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

2. install ndiswrapper and related files

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 ndisgtk

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Remote Desktop is disabled by default in Windows Vista, but it’s easy enough to turn it back on. If you need to access your Vista PC from another box, it’s an essential thing to turn on.

To get to the configuration page, you can either right-click the Computer icon and choose properties, or you can type in system into the start menu search box, and then System.

Now you’ll want to click the Remote Settings link on the left hand side.

Check “Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer” and “Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop” (this means that you can access your remote computer using Windows XP also).

Note: This will not work for Home editions of Windows Vista. Read the rest of this entry »

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Allows proper local or remote shutdown of machine.

SHUTDOWN [/i | /l | /s | /r | /g | /a | /p | /h | /e] [/f] [/m \\computer][/t xxx][/d [p|u:]xx:yy [/c "comment"]]

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