Support for wireless

[manishk]

Hi,

Can you please consider providing better out-of-the-box support for wireless cards...like Broadcom 43xx series which had a known issue with Ubuntu 6.10 preinstalled drivers.

I heard that the latest Linux kernel will support these directly...but never understood what that means!

Thanks You!

[jett]

I also had issues getting my broadcom wireless driver to work with my laptop with ubuntu.

[clem]

I don't think we will automate the wireless configuration in Bianca, but if it helps we could have ndiswrapper-utils installed by default. Maybe we could even include some INF files and a copy of the ndiswrapper wiki on the disc...

.. would that help ?

[manishk]

Thats a great idea!

You can include the latest ndis-wrapper (1.30), ndis-utils and ndisgtk. The last one is a graphical frontend for installing the drivers. This will make it easier for newbies like me to get our wireless working, easily!

As for the .inf and wiki include them if its 'okay' because I dont think they are really necessary as ndisgtk makes the installation as simple as point and click!


Thanks

[clem]

Well... you mean ndisgtk automates the whole process so you don't have to fetch the right INF file yourself ? Also, how does ndisgtk fetch the INF file... via an Internet connection ? lol

We have to assume the user won't be connected at this stage.

Clem

[jonpackard]

I think the best bet is to have a GUI setup utility that allows the user to select the driver files from a CD or other media. Most users will have a driver disc or will have them on their windows partition.

[manishk]

No, what I meant to say was exactly what jonpackard is asking for.

So like he said we have to just browse to the location where we have the .inf and say 'yes'!!

That means we can avoid the 'Terminal' which might be scary to some newbies (it was, for me).

I found a screenshot on the net

[manishk]

I just read that Fiesty supports these Broadcom cards by default.

I read it in on a blog, who has been testing Fiesty.

May be you can just look into it, because I dint know what to make of it.

[clem]

Ok I'll look into that and probably add those three packages to Bianca.

[manishk]

Thanks!

I was just wondering...how will you manage to get in so many things into Bianca and keep it at 700MB??

[clem]

Oh we'll find a way. The more we look at it the more we see things to remove and others to add

[jonpackard]

I just read that Fiesty supports these Broadcom cards by default.

I read it in on a blog, who has been testing Fiesty.

May be you can just look into it, because I dint know what to make of it.

I just ran the Fiesty Fawn Alpha 1 Live CD on my fiancee's laptop that uses a broadcom wireless card. It still gives the same errors Edgy gives about broadcom drivers during boot. Looks like ndiswrapper is still the way to go.

[clem]

A Quick update on that: ndiswrapper 1.1 and ndisgtk will be there in Bea's stable release.

Clem

[jonpackard]

Thanks Clem! Now I'll be able to run the Live CD on my fiancee's laptop.

[manishk]

Well...I guess the problem is with the 1.1 release (or whichever most distros are currently coming out with). I have tried the NDISwrapper 1.8 and it works (atleast my card did, BCM4311).

It DID NOT work with any earlier releases!

[clem]

Ok, I'm including ndiswrapper-utils-1.8 in Bea. I don't like to do that, especially after a code freeze, and I hope I'm not introducing a bug by doing that. I suppose in the worst case, people will be able to remove that package and default their ndiswrapper back to a 1.1 version by doing so.

Clem