New laptop, new problems.
After I got sufficiently satisfied with Linux on my laptop, I got a new task: putting it on girlface’s Compaq Presario V5000.
It’s ironic, because her sound and video work full-on right off the bat, but her wireless card is funky. It’s a Broadcom of the bcm43xx variety (”Air Force One”, claims lspci). It connects, most of the time, but it drops packets like it’s cool. The ndiswrapper solution doesn’t seem to work at all, and I’ve tried several firmwares with the bcm43xx kernel module. Best guess at the problem: something changed in the bcm43xx source in the kernel. Best guess at a solution: diff, patch.
What’s even more odd is that it worked with the original version of Ubuntu I gave it (6.10 “Edgy”, I believe), but started showing problems as soon as I upgraded it to 7.10 “Gutsy”.
By the way, no, I’m not moving away from Debian. Crossbone, my mailserver/firewall/proxy/etc., still runs Debian unstable. But this is a laptop system, and Ubuntu is fairly mature — aside from which, I didn’t feel like fighting with APT to get my video card working at full capacity, let alone doing it the hard way. Ahh, the good ol’ days.
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