I'm now running the current beta of Ubuntu Hardy Heron my laptop. Boots fast. Runs fast. Drives my laptop's screen well. Very nice.

My daughter's machine is authorized for all of my itunes music, so I'll just burn it to CDs from there.

The biggest problems:

1. The machine chose— and I do mean "chose," as in did it elegantly with shutdown messages and everything— to power itself off during the update process. Twice. I think this may have been due to a buggy laptop power management program that made updating itself rather difficult. (; But now it has been updated. And this is a beta release.

2. Wifi. This was expected. Apparently Broadcom chips are a big fat exception to the rule that most wifi chips work reasonably well with Linux.

As it turns out, it's not hard to make it work at all. It's the confusing way the various HOWTOs on the subject are written that makes it seem hard, and wastes a lot of time.

So here's the right way to get your wifi mojo goin' on a Dell Latitude D610 under Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta:

1. Open a terminal prompt

2. sudo bash (become root)

3. apt-get install b43-fwcutter

b43-fwcutter will run off and get the firmware for your Broadcom chip. For legal reasons it can't be distributed with Linux. Most HOWTOs muddle this issue with discussions of how to manually download the firmware. You don't have to. Let b43-fwcutter do it.

You should now have a /lib/firmware/b43 folder full of pretty files.

4. rmmod b43 (it's OK if you get a complaint that it wasn't loaded)

5. modprobe b43

The preceding two commands set up the driver for your card again, giving it a nudge to notice all that pretty firmware.

6. ifconfig wlan0 up

Boom. That's it, you're done. Your wifi networks should start showing up in the handy little wifi network manager in the upper left. My WPA security worked with no problems.

I still need to try this afresh after a reboot and make sure there are no funny little commands that have to be done at boot time. There shouldn't be.

Still need a good solution for backing up my Nokia phone.

Tags: bcm4311, broadcom, dell, dell latitude d610, hardy heron, linux, ubuntu