So, I decided to take the plunge, and partition off a small (couple of Gb) Linux system on my laptop, to see if it would be usable enough to replace Windows on it.

So, I put on Ubuntu 8.04, and in fairness to it (you can tell this is going to end well ;-)), most stuff worked perfectly. Graphics and sound worked no problem, although by default the switch to enable headphone jack sensing was switched to off. However once I found the option in the mixer, it worked perfectly. Graphics (intel-based) ran fine at 1024×768, with even Compiz working fine (although I switched it off as its not really needed on my laptop).

However, there was a big problem. Wifi.

Now, Ethernet worked fine. I plugged in a cable, set the IP address etc, and the laptop was online no problem. However my wifi light remained dark. A quick bit of reading up, and I found out my wireless card (Broadcom 4306) needed to use either ndiswrapper or the new B43-fwcutter to use the Windows driver/access the firmware code. Fair enough. I tried both, and in both cases the blue light came on. However also in both cases, I couldn’t connect to my WPA-secured network.

After spending an afternoon messing about with it. I admitted defeat.

In the evening though, I thought, as a last-ditch attempt, I’ll try Mandriva just to see if another distro can sort it out.  I installed the system, and was very happy to see that one of the last steps in the installation was to select the driver (I picked B43-fwcutter) and enter all your wireless settings.  Something I must admit I prefer to Ubuntu’s (sort it out after you’ve rebooted approach, although there’s no real benefit to either).

Much to my surprise, the wifi sprung to life.  The blue light came on, and it connected.   I was pretty happy.

However, I do prefer Ubuntu’s package management.  So I thought that perhaps KDE made the difference.  So I tried installing Kubuntu.  Long story short, I must admit, I found Kubuntu much less polished than the main distro, but I also was back to having a non-working wifi.

Currently I’ve reinstalled Mandriva.  However, big surprise, the wifi’s playing up again.   I’m pretty much at the point of sticking to Windows, and just trying to ensure that my next laptop (which is probably a while away) has a natively-supported wifi chipset.

I am wondering however if part of the problem is me trying out different drivers (ndiswrapper and b43-fwcutter) and if they’re causing problems for each other.   Of course, installing one uninstalls the other, and I update the blacklist as appropriate, but given that I did get it working under Mandriva at one point, I am stuck wondering what exactly is going on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 13:45 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.