Reilly2040's Blog

Well, as the counter on the right shows, the release of Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope is happening any time now.

As always, I’m excited to see what the new distribution has to offer over the previous version, however this time I find this tinged with caution, as previously my main installation was on the second disk of my desktop PC, so if the upgrade broke anything, I could happily reboot into Windows and keep using the machine until I got it fixed.

Now however, my main installation is my laptop, which is 100% Ubuntu. And as long term readers (both of them ) will know, I’ve had a tortured history getting my wifi to work (not necessarily getting the card’s drivers setup, more the authentication to my home network that kept failing).

So do I grab the new distro based on the fact that it worked in Intrepid, and since its all setup and working, it should survive the upgrade, or do I hold off in the fear that the upgrade will knacker my network connectivity?

Odds on, I’m going to crack and risk the upgrade. Realistically the only thing that’s given me hassle in the past has been the wifi, so if that breaks, then I can switch to Ethernet to try and get it fixed (or pull files off the laptop prior to wiping and reinstalling).

Look forward to an “I broke my laptop” post tomorrow

Its been a thorn in my side for months now, but yesterday I thought I’d have another stab at getting my wifi working on my laptop (glutton for punishment, I know) yesterday. Imagine my surprise when, on booting, the wifi connected no problem.

Despite not working on its initial install, it now seems quite happy. I’m still not completely sure how well the default driver (b43-fwcutter) is supporting my card as, while the connection seems stable, the blue wifi light on my laptop keeps flicking on and off. Could just be an asthetic thing though, but I may try switching over the driver to ndiswrapper and seeing what happens.

Still, if this test install runs smoothly for the next week or so, I reckon I’ll completely repartition the laptop and setup Ubuntu Intrepid as its main OS. Which given how creaky the 3-and-a-half year old WinXP installation was getting will make me a lot happier. Looks like a win for the new network manager.

I’m a glutton for punishment I think. I’ve blogged about this before, but I’ve been having another crack at getting the wifi to work on my laptop under Ubuntu again.   I really can’t figure it out.

With ndiswrapper, I get my broadcom card’s drivers installed.  Near as I can tell, this definitely works.  The blue light comes on, and I can get my laptop connecting to my wifi either unencrypted, or using WEP.

However, I use WPA on my LAN, and I’m not particularly wanting to compromise it’s security.  And it seems to be at the WPA authentication that everything’s falling apart.  I’ve tried both ndiswrapper and the fwcutter drivers automatically installed by Ubuntu.  I’ve even borrowed a kernel-supported wireless PCMCIA card from a friend, and that had the same problem.

I’ve tried different distros, broadcasting my usually-hidden SSID (and that was a story within itself), and nothing seems to work.

At this point I’d be suspecting my router of being Linux unfriendly, except that my Xandros-powered EeePC talks to it no bother (after installing some of the updates).

Its been really doing my head in.  I’ve tried both the gnome network manager, and last night I tried wicd (which, having now played with it, I actually think is a bit nicer than the Gnome version).  At this point I’m wondering if manually configuring my wlan settings by hand is the way to go…

I reckon tonight I’ll need to sit down, note my network card details etc, and put a post up on Ubuntu Forums pleading for help.