Ubuntu/Mint

[Sphexi]

I have an older box that I was running the free 120 day trial of WHS on, it was alright but I figured I'd just go Linux and be better off with more options. I grabbed Mint and put it on, everything looked good except my wireless card didn't seem to be supported. I think. It's really friggen hard to tell because it's been years since I've touched Linux (Redhat 5 when they were still on their own was last one I used), and I can't find a "device manager" style thing anywhere in the KDE/Gnome interface. I see hardware drivers, which is nice and all, but only tells me that there's an ATI driver available. I have an Asus WL-138g card, it has a Broadcom B43 chip in it, so I went and got the b43-fwcutter package and the Broadcom driver pack to update the kernel with.

Doesn't work very well, as I couldn't get the fwcutter package to actually build, just massive errors. I tried using the compat wireless package from linuxwireless, it supposedly installed up to date drivers but I still can't figure out what's up with the wireless card.

So I grabbed straight Ubuntu, blew away Mint and put it on, out of box it said I have the Broadcom chip/card installed, but it doesn't see anything. With WHS I had 79% signal strength, and there's at least 5 other wireless networks within range that it could connect to, it sees nothing.

Gotta say I'm kind of frustrated, it's as if they've tried to simplify the OS so much that when I actually need to go in and play with the drivers/hardware setup there's nowhere to do so.

 

[TonyRic]

Try base ubuntu (I haven't used Mint in over a year) and check that out, it has a restricted drivers manager that should download and install that driver just fine for you. I use that chipset (mini-pci) in my Dell Laptop at work.

 

[Sphexi]

Originally posted by: TonyRic
Try base ubuntu (I haven't used Mint in over a year) and check that out, it has a restricted drivers manager that should download and install that driver just fine for you. I use that chipset (mini-pci) in my Dell Laptop at work.

Problem is I don't have an Internet connection to this room, and I'd have to get a 100' cable, or move absolutely everything, just to get it hooked up. I really don't need it that badly, instead I ordered a new USB based wireless dongle, one that is natively supported, and comes with a CD with fancy new Linux drivers on it.

Also, I got the BCM43xx drivers, supposedly installed them (it now says that wireless is on), still can't see any networks or even create a network I can see from my router (which runs dd-wrt).

I'll just wait for the new dongle and go from there.