[ubuntu-in] BSNL Broadband conncetion in ubuntu 9.10

[Sambit Bikas Pal]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 15:05, suranjan jii <suranjan.suranjan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Namaskar brother,
> I checked it and  can't see the name of the wifi network in the list
>  of networks. Pls tell me which driver i have to install. I am using
> Dell laptop latitude D400.
>

In order to install the driver for wifi, first get connected to the
net using your Airtel connection (don't worry, the driver is quite
small in size, it will not take much time). Then go to System -->
Administration --> Hardware drivers
You will get a list of proprietary drivers that are available for your
system. I guess Dell Latitude D400 uses Broadcom wifi card. Select the
Broadcom STA driver and click activate. It should download and install
the driver on your system. Restart your computer. Wifi should work.
Please try this out.

Well you are absolutely right that Ubuntu should automatically do
these things, so that the user doesn't need to worry about these
little issues. However the problem in this case is not with Ubuntu.
Broadcom is not kind enough to provide GNU GPLed (sorry, but in case
you don't know what it is -- it is a software license that allows free
distribution/development of the software, read more about this here if
you want - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html) drivers.
The current drivers that are available for Broadcom are proprietary,
which restricts their free distribution as well as development.
For example computers having wifi card from Intel, generally work out
of the box, since Intel releases open source drivers for most of their
hardwares. These open source drivers can be included in the default
installation, since there is no issue with the distribution of such
drivers.

Anyway please mail us, if you come across any issue while installing
the drivers.

Thanks.

-- 
Sambit Bikas Pal
MS 5th Year
Indian Institute Of Science Education & Research Kolkata,

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