[ubuntu-uk] More interesting things about wireless drivers

[Rowan Berkeley]

I've just been upgrading my oldest machine, a Lenovo N500, and here is 
another interesting feature of the wireless driver landscape. Whereas 
the Compaq machine seemed to find the wireless driver already on board, 
and installed it automatically, the Lenovo machine lost the necessary 
driver it already had, during the upgrade, and had to be connected with 
a network cable after upgrade from the USB stick, so that it could find 
the necessary driver (Broadcom) in bcmwl-kernel-source (proprietory). In 
this case I had to go to Software and Updates Additional Drivers tab to 
OK it. But there are a range of possibilities here: maybe in some cases 
it will find online, download and install automatically, given the 
temporary connection via the network cable. So even if you have a 
machine which is wireless capable before the upgrade, you might need to 
switch to network cable during the upgrade.