look Mom no wires
Jeesh how long ago was it I bought the new laptop? Anyways I spent an entire week worth of evenings and hours on the weekend struggling to get the internal wireless working in ubuntu linux. While looking around and deciding to buy the laptop I did I researched the compatability of a broadcom BCM4310 chip. Broadcom does not provide info on their drivers so Linux geeks have to reverse engineer drivers. There were lots of tutorials for using ndiswrapper to get it working so I figured it was gonna be no problem. I lost a good amount of hair and struggled to not drink away my sorrows dealing with that dam wireless chip. I reinstalled at least 8 times.
I gave up after a while and started looking for a wireless expresscard. I did not want to have a USB one sticking out where my clumsy ass would tear the socket out of the laptop. There is not much out there for expresscard wireless adapters, but I was glad to see belkin had one. My old laptop used a Belkin card and it worked really well with linux. Did a quick search and saw it worked nicely with linux. Well over lunch it showed up on my door step, a brown box containing a Belkin F5D8073 N wireless card. jammed it in the slot, copied over the windows driver folder, used ndisgtk to load the driver, reboot and off the wires I was. Joy.
The funny part is I still sit 5 feet from the router with the power plug connected 
We’re all-WinXP and even we have to use a Linksys card on my wife’s HP laptop to get it to connect to our Netgear router. My little bro and I both have slightly older Toshiba laptops, his will connect to the router but mine won’t unless I slap in that Linksys card. My desktop uses a Linksys USB adapter.
I’ve had different routers (Linksys, Netgear) and several different adapters and I’ve never had everything work across all 3 or 4 PCs without buying an extra thingy or two, even when I was sure to buy all the same brand.
Wifi can be so frustrating. When I finally get a house, I think I’ll just run a ton of cable all over the place.
Comment by Jeff — February 7, 2008 @ 4:00 pm
nothing like a wire
I had issues with belkin in the past, but they seem to save me when dealing with linux. Still I love my Linksys wrt54g seems everybody has that router.
Comment by beerorkid — February 7, 2008 @ 4:05 pm
Hooray!
Comment by ghogan — February 7, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
this comment is from the plop plop machine.
I have achieved a major milestone
Comment by beerorkid — February 7, 2008 @ 6:28 pm
Over 75 % of my comments here are made from the toidy… Sometimes I don’t even need to go, I just want to make a comment.
Comment by jschwa — February 7, 2008 @ 11:12 pm
Comment by beerorkid — February 8, 2008 @ 9:35 am