[CoLoCo] 802.11 Woes and Nvidia Nightmares

[Collins Richey]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 7:55 PM, Michael TheZorch Haney
<thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have my latest report on my efforts to get the AMD64 version of Ubuntu
> working on my laptop.  According to Hardware Drivers the drivers for my
> wireless card are installed and "In Use", however there is no
> configuration option for a Wi-Fi connection under Network.  I had to
> connect via Ethernet to make sure Ubuntu was downloading up to date
> drivers it.  Hardware Drivers says the drivers are Enabled and In Use.
> My wireless adapter is an Athena AR5007EG.

A little googling never hurts. According to this thread, you need
ndiswrapper and the windows drivers for the card. This may not be
exactly your card and Ubuntu release, but the principles are the same.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-setup-atheros-ar5007eg-wireless-on-feisty-fawn-with-ndiswrapper.html

I haven't followed this. On most Debian systems (maybe Ubuntu
qualifies?) there are a number of fwcutter-xxxx packages that automate
the process of obtaining and enabling the required windows drivers.

>
> I'm also still having an Nvidia graphics problem on both my laptop and
> desktop.  I can get the drivers to download but I am unable to use
> Desktop Effects.  Hardware Drivers says the drivers are Enabled but Not
> In Use.

I'm confused. This sounds like Windows terminology. What does your
/usr/X11/xorg.conf file say. If you're using the 'nv'; driver, you're
not using the native drivers. If you are using 'nvidia', then you are
using the native drivers. What happened during/after the install. I
thought that Ubuntu had a builtin procedure these days to offer to
install the native drivers?

> My desktop uses a 8x AGP Nvidia Geforce FX 5600 card w/256MB
> DDR RAM.  My laptop uses an Nvidia Geforce 7000M/nForce 610N chipset

Once again, googling and reading the nVida supported gpu page

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

seems to indicate that Geforce FX 5600 is supported by the current
(not legacy) series. The latest driver is 173.14.05. I would use the
Ubuntu forum to determine whate driver they are offering, and I'm sure
there are howto instructions for installing the nVidia package if not
available in the Ubuntu repos.

A final suggestion. Get familiar with and post questions on the Ubuntu
forum. They are quite helpful, and there is a wealth of information.

-- 
Collins Richey
 If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
 of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.