Yesterday I was productive – hooray! I spent the morning working on several things, and realized that while I was working on these other things it wouldn’t take too much time to toss the Debian install on the laptop and see if it would work since a bunch of time in any install is waiting anyway.
So I plugged in the wireless card and booted up the laptop with the Debian etch net install cd in. The install cd saw the wireless card, which was pretty exciting, but the firmware was not there for it to use it and connect to the network. This was to be expected, Ubuntu does the same thing. But I was hopeful that this would all work out since there is an atmel-firmware package for Debian and that’s all I needed to install for Ubuntu.
So I got the Debian install up and running with x, ended up installing some Gnome libs so I could get the happy-clicky-connect-to-wireless app running. I installed the atmel-firmware package and was further encouraged by websites that said “In Debian just `apt-get install atmel-firmware`!”
I spent nearly 2 hours fighting with it after `apt-get install atmel-firmware` didn’t work. And then I gave up. I don’t understand how modules and firmware play together and others I spoke with about the problem didn’t seem to understand either and we were all just poking around in the dark trying random things. I did learn a lot though, so I wouldn’t say my time was wasted.
I don’t think the issue is additional software that needs to be installed per se, since a very basic Ubuntu install still can get wireless working. It’s not the version of atmel drivers, since Debian and Ubuntu use the same one. As far as I can tell, there are two options that remain: 1) Debian and Ubuntu load and use firmware somehow differently that is unrelated to the identical Gnome connect to wireless program I used 2) There is a difference in the default kernel between Debian and Ubuntu that makes it so the firmware does not work in the default Debian kernel but works fine in Ubuntu. The next step when (if?) I decide to tackle this project again will be carefully reviewing the default Ubuntu kernel options and duplicating them in a custom Debian kernel.
So, defeated, I reinstalled Ubuntu. I finally took the advice of
Even better, the laptop is running great. It’s really surprising how much resources Gnome takes up just sitting around, XFCE4 really blows it out of the water. Firefox opens up quickly, I can have a few programs open at once without really noticing. In the end, I’m happy with it now and I think the only reason I would switch back to Debian is to regain lost geek points.