I’m wireless! *glee*
I have a Belkin F5D6020 Version 2 wireless card. I bought it about 2 years ago for my Compaq, I’d done my research and was convinced it would work fine in Linux. Of course when I got it home I learned that it was harder to get working than I thought. Never did get it working in Debian, Michael got it working in Gentoo, but then the laptop died. The card has floated around the house since then, I groaned at the prospect of trying to get it working again.
After some searching in the Ubuntu forums a bit I learned that it should just work out of the box. Really? That’d be amazing! So I poked around with it, but since our wireless network is secured in multiple ways I had to wait for Michael to help me with that bit. He took a look at it this evening and said “I think you just need the atmel firmware… but I’m not going to do it for you, you have to do it yourself, I know you can.” Meep.
But he was right. It turns out that Ubuntu has an atmel-firmware package in multiverse. It was as easy as `apt-get install atmel-firmware` – and it all works! I am crazy excited.
So far I’m very pleased with Ubuntu’s hardware detection. I’m not as happy with all the junk it installs, this laptop only has a 3 gig harddrive and with little more than the base install I’m up to 2 gigs. As soon as I got it up I installed XFCE4, but I’ve since uninstalled it and loaded up Gnome. Gnome has nice little tools for doing things, like getting on a wireless network, I think I’m geeky enough to have earned some lazy points on this laptop. I even loaded up Synaptic this evening to browse packages – gasp! ;) I’m sure I’ll toss Gnome once I get used to things, I might even drop Ubuntu entirely and install Debian someday, but for now I just want a clicky happy laptop that works in Linux, and that’s what I have. Thank you Ubuntu!