After a bit of a struggle I’ve managed to get wireless networking at home. Unfortunately, my first attempts to test the connectivity to the rest of the world coincided with the power outages at Telehouse, a “bullet-proof” ISP that too many people rely on, including ADSL services, the BBC website, Nominet, some DNS servers….
The Ubuntu Live CD worked straight away for the laptop: I was able to boot into a temporary copy of Linux using the VESA display drivers, and test sound, CD and other peripherals (obviously) and wired networking. However, optimising the system wasn’t so easy, and as I say Nick practically installed Ubuntu for me, fixing all that he could.
Below is a list of the main fixes and workarounds that Nick employed, for my reference as much as anything else.
Now that Gutsy Gibbon is fairly mature, I’ve managed to upgrade my machine to it and am now running the 2.6.22-14-386 kernel. More importantly, with a minimum of fuss I now have video, wireless and sound!