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View Full Version : [ubuntu] Wireless problems (rant)



jfl
April 8th, 2010, 10:47 PM
My wife just got her first laptop; she finally decided to live in the 21st century !!!
A pretty basic Lenovo with ******* 7 pre-installed.
I immediately proceeded to install Karmic.
Following what I read on this forum, I used the W7 utility to shrink a couple of partitions, leaving me with 20 GB for / and 30 GB for /home, plus a couple GB for swap.
The live CD I had didn't work, the alt neither; they worked earlier on another machine. I booted in W7 downloaded the .iso file, burned it on the Lenovo, this time everything went smooth; grub installed, loads W7 or Karmic; looks good.
However the wireless doesn't come up at all; usual tricks, no joy, check the forum, find an excellent article on broadcom cards, hook the computer to a Rj-45, download the driver and everything works.

I am still P.O'ed.

I have been using Ubuntu since Dapper Drake, 4 out of the 5 boxes in this home/office run Karmic.
I cannot understand that I have to go through these Hoops and Loops to get the wireless working; it is not like Lenovo and Broadcom are unusual units made in the mountains of Afghanistan one by one !!!!!
Fortunately, I enjoy the command line, and can do this stuff with minimal problems; but nobody, repeat nobody, that I know well, let's say 60-70 people would even come close to try. And being a corporate pilot, the people I know are mostly well educated.

If Ubuntu wants to go beyond a group of geeks or IT types, these problems have to be resolved, especially when they are so basic.

I must say that the installaion and upgrade procedures have greatly improved over the years, but the "devil is in the details".

Sometimes I question the idea of a new release every 6 months; mis it putting too much pressure on the team ???

OK guys, rant is over, time to get a cool one and enjoy the scenery.