Remember the good old days of RH7 et al when almost all the software had to be recompiled and adding a new hardware meant atleast a day's work to get everything working properly.. and when just an installation would make you entitled to use the word "Geek". Yes...those were the days.. It really was a great feeling back then.. you felt completely in control of your PC.
Now evolution is indispensable .. so Linux evolved.. from an experimental system to a commercially sellable system.. We had a barrage of distros.. touting compatibility, snazzy graphics and point and click solution to most problems. The public applauded and accepted Linux but deep down inside I hated them for liking linux just because of its looks..
Anyway.. my taste in distros underwent a drastic change from RH to Fedora to Debian and finally to Ubuntu. I was not a fan of the pointing device but the apt-get and the highly up to date repos have kept me hooked up. There were hardly any instances when I had to mess with something. Scripts like Automatix took care of most of the painful jobs.. Even if I had to recompile the sources, ./configure make "make install", hardly counts as hacking.
Anyhoo.. coming to the meat of the subject a friend of mine got some HP laptop with AMD 64 Turion, 2 GB RAM and a Broadcom 4310UART wireless card and was bugging me that he could not get wireless to work under Ubuntu. Normally I dont like support calls but this changed it all. There was a bug in Broadcom drivers(Specifically the way NDISwrapper used them) for AMD64 having more than 1GB data.. An opportunity too good to miss.. I went to my friends place to fix his card(yeah am mad and was totally bored).
After two hours of hair pulling, RTFMing and shouting out F&^* loud.. I got the damn thing to work. It was the most refreshing thing I had done in a while :).
PS: If you are having a similar problem..read this, this and this.
Now evolution is indispensable .. so Linux evolved.. from an experimental system to a commercially sellable system.. We had a barrage of distros.. touting compatibility, snazzy graphics and point and click solution to most problems. The public applauded and accepted Linux but deep down inside I hated them for liking linux just because of its looks..
Anyway.. my taste in distros underwent a drastic change from RH to Fedora to Debian and finally to Ubuntu. I was not a fan of the pointing device but the apt-get and the highly up to date repos have kept me hooked up. There were hardly any instances when I had to mess with something. Scripts like Automatix took care of most of the painful jobs.. Even if I had to recompile the sources, ./configure make "make install", hardly counts as hacking.
Anyhoo.. coming to the meat of the subject a friend of mine got some HP laptop with AMD 64 Turion, 2 GB RAM and a Broadcom 4310UART wireless card and was bugging me that he could not get wireless to work under Ubuntu. Normally I dont like support calls but this changed it all. There was a bug in Broadcom drivers(Specifically the way NDISwrapper used them) for AMD64 having more than 1GB data.. An opportunity too good to miss.. I went to my friends place to fix his card(yeah am mad and was totally bored).
After two hours of hair pulling, RTFMing and shouting out F&^* loud.. I got the damn thing to work. It was the most refreshing thing I had done in a while :).
PS: If you are having a similar problem..read this, this and this.
I have noticed that this is fairly common. Like my laptop. I can't really find drivers for the wireless card - and suprisingly enough, I can't find drivers for the Ethernet card! I would thing ethernet would be well supported. But NO! I e-mailed ULi asking for drivers about a month ago. No answer so far.
ReplyDeleteOh, you might want to know that I am trying to get drivers for a laptop running Windows.
There is no better word to describe you - *crazy* :)
ReplyDelete