VT’s Tech Blog

I just got one from a new lot of Dell Vostro laptops at office, and spent a day setting up and configuring Ubuntu on it. Hardy Heron seems to have improved on most fronts during the fresh install and the only thing which didn’t work out of the box was the WIFI connection. I wonder why Broadcom doesn’t come with linux drivers yet. I had to get ndiswrapper to install the Windows XP drivers for the chipset. If you’re also stuck with the same problem – here’s the easy way out – install ndisgtk:

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

Once you install this, head over to System>Administration>Windows Wireless Drivers. Click on “Install New Driver” and choose the location where you’ve extracted your Windows XP drivers. Select on the .inf file in the folder and you should see a screen which looks like this:

If you see that the status shows Hardware present, you’ve successfully got your Wireless working

Another tip to speed up app load times on Ubuntu – try preload. You can install preload using aptitude:

sudo apt-get install preload

preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

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