Trouble with Ubuntu

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Hi folks, I have jumped in and installed Ubuntu but cannot get the wireless to work. I have checked out the forums but they sort of require a working knowledge which I do not have. My computer is a HP nx9010 with a broadcom wireless adapter, It finds the adapter in terminal, but that is all. Any help you give will have to take my noobness into account.

I hope you haven't done a complete switch, you may need to either install the driver or set up installed software. If you have a full desktop computer, then wireless is completely useless. If you have a notebook/laptop then it makes sense.

I would be encouraged to check out the ubuntu site where you got the file from.

You said wireless ... wireless what? mouse - keyboard - sound?

So it finds the wireless device. Thats good. That saves a whole mess of problems.

I'm betting its just not authorized to connect to your router yet.

When you boot into it you should see two little computers in the upper right corner, on the top menu bar. clicking that will give you some wireless options.

See if you can find the name of your home(or any) wireless connections there.

What I did originally(I'm not so knowledgable about wireless in general) is I took my laptop to a place where I knew they had an open wireless network, the local college. It allowed me to determine that yes, my wireless was going to function.

Once I knew that was going to work, I brought it home again and fiddled more.

I have temporarily made the home network open and it does not find the network. There are issues with this wireless adapter I am having trouble with the instructions given on the ubuntu forums, I found a step by step guide but the third step failed cos it could not find the package I was asking for.

Temporarily try the ndiswrapper

Also keep the boot disk in there when updating so that it can find stuff from there, rather than downloading.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiD ... diswrapper

Woo for broadcom wifi. Unsupported in Linux because Broadcom sucks ass. (I have the same ones, and they're a pain) but ndiswrapper should do the trick.

wasnt that the company with the CEO in a drug scandal?

I had loads of trouble with my Compaq v2000 notebook, Broadcom drivers are extremely buggy with
ubuntu, when I first installed it, everything worked fine for a couple of weeks then the wifi died, tried
reinstalling the driver using the nids wrapper, only to have it fail on rebooting. Everything else works
fine, maybe they will get the problems worked out, but not until the next version of ubuntu.

It's not that the Linux drivers for Broadcom are buggy- it's that they don't yet exist, so you have to use a Windows driver via ndiswrapper, which understandably is an imperfect solution. Linux hackers are probably hard at work reverse-engineering a driver so we poor saps with Broadcom chipsets will one day have native support, but I don't think it will be in the next Ubuntu release- after all, there's only 2 more months until that.

BTW, anyone else excited for Intrepid Ibex? I can't wait!

I'm already using it!

Still having major trouble, Orwell is correct the damn Broadcom wireless card is the prob. The linux forums are full of advice but I do not understand what the heck they are talking about. I have a basic understanding of Terminal. I have the XP drivers and can get to the inf and sys files, I have installed ndiswrapper. Now what?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1071920&mode=linear
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty <This one includes several other links on the page that might be useful.
http://www.micahcarrick.com/11-04-2007/bcm4328-wep-gutsy-ubuntu.html
Also, I have heard that a couple people got theirs working with nothing more than the command [sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter]. From those guides, just copy and paste the commands into the terminal- there'll be more time to learn how the command line works later.

Do you know which Broadcom chipset you have?

On my wireless card in Ubuntu, I cannot find any wireless networks with the default utility. I have to install knetworkmanager and run that to find and connect to networks. Perhaps it might be necessary for you as well.

sudo apt-get install knetworkmanager
knetworkmanager

I'm not quite that brave.

Had the same problem with Cisco wireless cards. I would use ndiswrapper.