That or I was experiencing a bad combination of things. Bad Broadcom driver, slow internet speeds, etc.

But seriously, I am relieved. I don’t have to rant as much as I used to about the Broadcom wireless networking issues on my laptop. I suppose there are still many of you who struggle with it. Don’t lose hope! It can still improve as I have seen things with my own eyes.

I have to admit though that it was my biggest mistake to just buy a random laptop two years ago and that’s why you should be smarter and not follow my example at all.

To my fellow Broadcom victims who are on Ubuntu Hardy, there are answers on the forums. Some of them don’t always work but it’s good to read and learn from them by trying them out. You’d never know, right? And through our feedback developers have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Post from: New Linux User

My process basically involves setting the essid and WEP password on the card and then bringing it up. In order to ensure that it comes up every time I boot, I make a little script and use update-rc.d to put it in the proper init directories.

What I didn’t know was that I could put the essid and WEP values into the /etc/network/interfaces file rather than writing a script. Reader Kurtis put me on to that little gem and when I took a look at my interfaces file, it explained a lot to me about the difference between distros that pick up my card and distros that don’t.

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
# wireless-* options are implemented by the wireless-tools package
wireless-mode managed
wireless-essid driveon
wireless-key1 8FB06577D76E84EE6D4233651D

I’m currently running flight 5 of Kubuntu Dapper Drake and it picked up my network card during install. It asked me for my essid and WEP key and lo’ and behold – this is where it stored it.

So, instead of writing a script to bring your card up, you may also want to try putting the correct values into your interfaces file (if your distro doesn’t do it for you during install) and see what happens.

Thanks, Kurtis!

Post from: New Linux User