[galechicago]

My install of OSX went very well! Everything is working great, except I am unable to turn on Airport, even though I have installed and re-installed DellEFI and the new DellEFI-1 about 5 times. I have rebooted about a dozen times. Also I threw away my internet plists. No matter what, I cannot turn Airport on. Wireless worked fine in Windows XP.

Does anyone have any ideas besides "re-install DellEFI"?

[mechdrew]

Have you checked to make sure you did not disable wireless in the BIOS settings?

[galechicago]

WLAN Control is enabled. Is there something else I should be looking for?

Everything is enabled in BIOS, except Boot-time Diagnostic Screen and USB Wake Support are disabled.

[mechdrew]

So it doesn't even show up at all? No icon in the menu bar or anything? I guess the worst case scenario would be a complete reinstall of OS X.

[galechicago]

The icon is there in the menu bar. However, clicking "Turn Airport On" doesn't do anything, either in the menu bar or in the Network System Preferences pane.

[mechdrew]

Um, I honestly don't know. The only help I have is to reinstall. I know, I know, there is a lot of time involved, but I had to spend five hours today just to get mine working. Technical glitches can be a pain.

[galechicago]

Thanks for trying, mechdrew! I'm gonna hold off on reinstalling for a couple of days; I can use it for watching movies and reading ebooks.

Eventually, though, I'd like to use it for the internet! I mean, that's the whole point of making it a Mac. Wireless worked fine in Windows XP, so no doubt it needs a fresh install of Leopard.

[Thunderstruck]

hey galechicago - me too!

This is my first post here, from my little appled mini.
I wanted to write EXACTLY the same as you did - airport cannot be activated, everything else works great.
Did a few reinstalls, running DELLEFI 1.1 about 10 times.
Did all of the software updates, rerunning DELLEFI again afterwards.
Got the latest BIOS, WLAN activated.
When WLAN is deactivated in BIOS, there is a message "no airport card installed".
When activated, it shows up in the system profiler, but cannot be activated anyhow.

There are some other posts about this issue, but not one of the proposed solutions worked here.
Hope someone can come up with a solution.
Thanks to everybody in this great community.

[namky]

There are some command line to turn on/off the airport card within Terminal.
Please try that:

To turn on Airport:
sudo ifconfig en1 up

To turn off Airport:
sudo ifconfig en1 down

[tastewar]

Have you tried booting to an ubuntu livecd (usb), installing the airplane mode application from dell, and enabling the wireless there?

There are posts here about this, but you don't mention specifically which solutions you've tried.