That sure is Edgy

Well, I upgraded my main laptop to Ubuntu Edgy last weekend, and for the most part things went OK (I used the official ‘update-manager -c’ procedure, so I didn’t get any severe breakage). Unfortunately, my wireless doesn’t work anymore. Sigh… I know I should have done more research into which laptops have good driver support for linux before I bought it, but it’s still frustrating. In the past I had to resort to the ndiswrapper driver to get it to work, but that doesn’t seem to work anymore. And I can’t seem to get the new bcm43xx driver to work right either. Alas, if only I were a hardware wizard. But congrats to the Ubuntu team. If I had the right hardware, I’m sure it’d be a fantastic release 🙂 And at least I get to play with the new GNOME stuff now.

Oh wait, I do have one more complaint about the upgrade: Bug #350053 drives me insane. I love Epiphany, but that bug completely screws up the way I use browse. I can use the ‘smart bookmarks’ feature, but it’s hard to reprogram my brain after getting used to just typing search terms in the location bar and hitting enter. If anyone can get the fix for that into Edgy, I’d be eternally grateful.

Also, if any of the brilliant Tango Friday participants want to make a nice little icon for the Nemiver debugger, that’d be great.

Joanne and I are heading out to the L.A. area for a long weekend tomorrow. Hopefully the weather out there’s nice and warm there. It’s certainly feeling a lot like winter up here. I could really use a few days off work, so I’m hoping for a few nice relaxing days, and the computer’s staying home.

4 thoughts on “That sure is Edgy”

  1. I was in the exact situation with my upgrade to Edgy the other day. I have a 64bit HP laptop with a bcm4318 card that worked fine in dapper w/ ndiswrapper. After the edgy upgrade it just went dead.

    Well, just 10 minutes ago I solved it by removing the distro’s ndiswrapper packages, manually deleting the kernel module and then download and installed ndiswrapper from source. It worked like a charm! 🙂

    Maybe this will work for you too…

    Some links:
    http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=10383.new
    http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-1.28.tar.gz?download

  2. I think there’s a bug open about this, but basically there’s two versions of ndis-wrapper, and the ‘official’ one doesn’t work. 1.08 I think it is works fine.

    I ran into same thing in dealing with my girlfriend’s laptop.

  3. If you want to make bcm43xx driver work, you should install bcm43xx-fwcutter and grab the bcmwl5.sys file in windows driver and extract the firmware, the kernel driver will then work like a charm.

    http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/materiel/wifi/bcm43xx
    Here is a link to one of the ubuntu tutorial which has been written for dapper but it still works with edgy

    Hope you can make it work

  4. Even easier, install the bcm43xx-fwcutter package and run sudo /usr/share/bcm43xx-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh

    You may have to turn off ndiswrapper (I don’t because my only bcm43xx card is in a ppc-based Mac Mini). Be aware that there’s a pretty bad bug in the version of bcm43xx that’s in the kernel included with Edgy. After some time, it may disable the keyboard and cause X to stop mapping new windows.

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