Reloading Experience--Wireless

[Larry Hartman]

For those who are US citizens, hope you all had a good Memorial Day weekend.

I had 4 days off and spent some of those four days reloading (K)ubuntu on my 
laptop.  I decided to do this because I first learned how to use Ubuntu on 
Dapper just before Edgy was released, and had upgraded twice to Feisty.  I 
made some mistakes in the initial loading process  that I just could not 
resolve that cost me abilities to use some w32codecs-related media.  So after 
wisdom from 8 months of use and improved packages I reloaded.

My system is an HP dv8000 laptop that comes with two hardware difficulties.  
The first is ATI XPress 200M graphics.  FGLRX has come a long way in the past 
8 months.  The other is the BCM4318 Air Force One wireless.  The BCM43xx 
module is too flaky with this card, so I went to NDISWrapper.  NDISWrapper 
was not so hard to get working, but Network Manager just would not play well.  
I eventually got nm to work ok, but never got my wireless to start 
immediately at boot.  So off to the Ubuntu forums I went.

Someone on the forums--I think Compwiz18--posted about a networking tool 
called WICD.  It is a replacement for nm that is built in Python.  Here is 
the sourceforge website:

http://wicd.sourceforge.net/pages/features.php

Let me tell you that for the past 8 months  I spent hours on nm to get it to 
run properly--and only partly succeeded.  WICD, however, was set up in 15 
minutes and working perfectly out of the box--it is a Debian package.  I 
suspect that many of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users out there would like to trade in nm 
for something better: well here is an opportunity to investigate. 

Oh, and BTW, my w32codecs-related media issues are completely resolved.  I 
also switched to Firefox from Konqueror, it simply works better on a couple 
key websites I visit.  Now I am less dependent on M$--and that is a good 
thing in my estimation.

Larry