The story continues from where we left off last time. Ubuntu 6.06 just came out and I decided to try it outside of the VM (I used VMWare exclusively for my Linux experiments before). Being brand new I hoped that most if not all of the devices in my laptop (now 2 years old) will be recognized. I also knew that the boot loader should be smart enough to recognize previous MBR and not kill it but offer it to me as another item in the boot menu.

The installation was generally smooth, not counting the fact that I was unable to use the “normal” install disk (desktop Ubuntu) but had to go for “alternative” install disk. For some reason, the desktop install (that also duals as a live CD) would not boot and would get stuck at the “mounting file system” phase. Alternative install disk only offers non-graphical UI, but that’s fine. There were more questions than XP and Vista combined asked me during the installation, but that is to be expected.

The installation was, subjectively (did not measure) the longest, but not by much. The fastest to install was Vista, then XP and then Ubuntu, but the differences are not huge. Looking at the device manager (screenshot to the right), the OS has recognized all of my devices, including wireless adapter. All of my hard drives were recognized too (external USB is nicely marked with an overlay icon), including XP and Vista partitions (mounted as read-only), screenshot to the left. Then I noticed that Wi-Fi is not working and even worse – the wireless card is not enabled, is not up, and cannot be turned on.

And that’s where the agony began. I’ll save you the trouble of finding out what’s wrong with my setup – took me quite a while until I found several forum posts, blog posts and finally this wiki page that made me understand what’s going on. You see, the wireless chipset I have is Broadcom BCM4309, which is 802.11a/b/g compliant. There are no official drivers and none of the computer manufacturers officially supports Linux, so you can’t get drivers from anywhere.

Actually, I was not completely right - the driver seems to be included in Ubuntu 6.06, but what you are lacking is firmware. For legal reasons, the Ubuntu team can’t distribute it but you can “get it” yourself. My complaint is that, as a user, I should have been warned about this and not have to search for the answer on the Internet and look into the system log (yes, the missing firmware problem is actually reported in the system log).

So how do you get the firmware? Why, you “steel” it from another driver, for example, one of the latest Dell Windows drivers. Insane? You bet, but it works. But you do need to install firmware cutter tool (the package name is bcm43xx-fwcutter), the instructions are on the wiki page I linked to. There are also differences in where the extracted firmware should be put, but you can see the location in the system log.

This is not all. In order to get “normal” UI for discovering and connecting to wireless networks that use WPA (you are using WPA and not WEP, right?) you have to do even more tinkering. Turns out you have to disable the built-in wpasupplicant and install Gnome Network Manager applet (again, see the wiki page for info). During the process, there are least two configuration files that you need to edit, both on a place that requires administrative privileges. At last, after all that, I was able to connect. Because you need a password for the WPA, Ubuntu stores it in some kind of secure storage for which yet another password is needed, plus you get asked for it every time you log in to the system (screenshot to the right).

Once online, everything worked just fine. The system updated itself (even kernel was updated in a first batch of updates!) and still continues to do so (see screenshot on the right). I was even able to get on the MSN Messenger using Gaim (screenshot to the left). Quite cool. Not everything is nifty– the suspend/hibernate functions do not seem to be working at all. The system does not react properly on closing the lid while manually hibernating the machine caused it to lock up in text mode. Both Vista and XP work just fine, except that Vista forgets the desktop resolution when waking up from the standby.

All in all, it was roughly as bad/good as I expected. Some amount of tinkering was necessary, even though not as much would have been necessary if only Ubuntu folks managed to warn me that even though my wireless chipset is recognized, the firmware can’t be installed. Ah well, maybe in the next version

One more thing: the order of installation for these 3 OSes turned out to be just right. XP installed first, then Vista recognizing it offered it in the boot menu, then Ubuntu recognized XP and listed that in the menu, but the loader is actually Vista’s and offers the two choices I just mentioned. So, to boot XP I have to wait for Ubuntu’s GRUB, then choose Windows XP, then I get Vista’s loader and choose “Earlier version of Windows”. Slightly involved, but works just fine.