boots fine. No wireless network seen. There may be no linux driver for that so we may have to look at ndiswrapper.
For now lets do an install. We click the install icon. It starts up the hard disk partitioner. Since this is a dual boot system we do not want to use the entire disk. We have /dev/sda1 which is the NTFS partition and /dev/sda5 which is the previous installation linux partition. So we choose manual installer and create a swap partition and a / partition. We choose not to migrate any data from the windows partition.
OS installs and we reboot. Same reboot problem - have to remove the battery and then power up. We log in. Sound works and there are 212 updates available.
It tells us that restricted drivers are available. We click to install and enable the Broadcom 43xx chipset family. It downloads the driver and asks us to specify the firmware location and supplies the url. We enable the driver. Going to the system, administration, network control panel we pull down on the network name box and viola it finds and lists the 2 WAP's. We choose the open one and set the password type to WEP key (ascii) and the configuration to DHCP and click OK. The network box seems frozen for a minute and then disappears. We try to run the applet again but it will not appear. We can't seem to log off or run any programs. Even pushing to power button does nothing. So it is remove the battery once again.
We run Firefox and download and install automatix. Ooops forgot to keep the external optical plugged in as the automatix install requires the CD. We plug it in and /dev/cdrom is found and mounted ok.
Now we run automatix and go get the missing stuff. However, we get some errors - unmet dependencies, it says apt-based error occured and installation was unsuccessful.
It suggests apt-get -f install so we open a terminal window and do sudo apt-get -f install and it installs some packages to fix the dependencies.
We rerun automatix. Looks like it has trouble connecting to archive.ubuntu.com ....very slow.
Ok now it is running. We'll let it run for a while and then install the updates overnight.
Updates are finished and everything is working fine. I can browse the network can copy files to the laptop. I played a quicktime movie but the color was off. Downloaded VLC and played the movie and now it is fine. We see the wireless networks but cannot connect. Pings to the router do not do anything.
We decide to install ndiswrapper. Once that is done with open a terminal and do lspci and examine the output. We see the laptop has a broadcom bcm4309 wireless. So we search google for bcmwl5a.inf and download the file. We will also need BCMWL5.sys which will need to be extracted on a windows machine.
We did all this and before setting up the ndiswrapper we unplugged the wired connection and rebooted the machine and lo - the wireless worked.
I find the default touchpad setting way too sensitive - windows pop open and menu items are selected just by having your fingers on the touchpad. So we goto system, preferences, mouse and disable the Tap to Click and Vertical Scrolling options. Now we can control what gets selected.
Everything is now working - just some fine tuning of options (setting windows to windowshade), turning off auto-complete in OO etc but the machine is working well. This will now be my travel machine.
3 comments:
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