I thought I’d give the Linux distro [Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition] a try. Mandriva was being a pain about setting up the NVIDIA graphics driver. Time for something new.
First setup your build environment. Pop in the install CD and run this in a terminal.
sudo apt-cdrom add sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install build-essential gcc -v
The following put me back on the network.
You are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.24
If you are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.24, follow these instructions.
Use version 011 of b43-fwcutter.
Download, extract the b43-fwcutter tarball and build it:
wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..
Use version 4.80.53.0 of Broadcom’s proprietary driver.
Download and extract the firmware from this driver tarball:
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o
Download and check for all the updates.
Ubtuntu’s hardware wizard was able to automatically download and install the NVIDIA display drivers. Do not try to manually install the NVIDIA display drivers or else the hardware wizard won’t work. For some graphics cards [setup] is required, but it was all automatic for me.
Ubtuntu has a ton of [visual effects] that you can enable.
I have to concede that Ubuntu is a better distribution than Mandriva. Ubuntu has better built-in hardware support and was easier to install.