One thing I dislike about ubuntu is that every time they release a new version, things get messed up. This happened to me when I upgraded my ubuntu to 7.10 as well.

Ubuntu Logo

So I immediately upgraded my ubuntu to 8.10. Connecting to the Internet(wireless) is always an issue among the users. I should say “newbie/inexperienced users”. I couldn’t connect to the internet because my wifi driver was disabled. Ubuntu the system itself has not provided me with good information to enable it. It tells you how you can check whether it’s enabled or disabled, and that’s it. If it’s disabled, it doesn’t tell you how to enable it. Anyways, you need to go on to their support forums and see if someone has already posted about the issue you are having and chances are someone already have. So next step would be to see if your product matches with theirs. If it doesn’t match, you keep searching on forums and eventually you will have to post your own topic. Sometimes, you don’t even get a response to your post. This literally can take hours.

This is one of the things that I want to see in ubuntu. They should either make ubuntu come with everything ready to work or they should prepare better documentation for common cases.  Anyhow,  here is what I did to get my wireless working again.

Thanks to “Ayuthia” for his helpful posts.

sudo modprobe -r b43 b44 ssb wl
sudo modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
sudo modprobe wl
sudo modprobe b44
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

If you are like me, who doesn’t understand much from linux and ubuntu, you are going to need to search the ubuntu forums to find the right piece of code to execute in terminal. It’s pretty much try and fail until you find the right one.

Those five command lines fixed my problem but everytime I reboot ubuntu, it would require me to execute them again and to fix that problem, you need to edit “rc.local” file in the system. To do that;

You need to edit “rc.local” and add following code at the end.

Open terminal and type this
gksudo gedit/etc/rc.local

and add this just before “exit 0″

modprobe -r b43 b44 ssb wl
modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
modprobe wl
modprobe b44
/etc/init.d/networking restart

After you save, you can restart your system. If you need further instructions, you should go ahead and post at ubuntu support forums. Also, here is my product info.
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:0b:00.0
logical name: eth1
version: 01
serial: 00:16:cf:71:b1:f1
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl ip=192.168.1.101 latency=0 module=wl multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg

As said, different devices require different installations. So good luck on searching the forums.

As many of you know, Ubuntu 8.10 has been released at the end of October.  I was able to upgrade my old ubuntu yesterday. I’m not a big fan of ubuntu but I like to have it on my laptop as my secondary operation system.

First thing you will notice that ubuntu has a new default background image.  First image is the new background.  Rest are just wallpapers that I found in background folder in ubuntu. This is also an upportunity for me to test Lightbox plugin I just installed.

To see these images in full size, just click on one of them and plugin should should take care of the rest. You can also use your array keys in your keybord to switch one to another.