I have been using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) since the beginning of December. So, this is a short term review. Although, I don’t think much will change in the long term.
I upgrade via the internet from 8.04. Considering the internet speeds in India, the download took about 6 hours to complete. After the upgrade completed and I rebooted my laptop, I expected 2 things:
- The WIFI would be broken… again
- Display would be screwed… again
After the laptop came back up again, what do I see? The display is fine! That was a relief!
Put in the username… password… press Enter… afraid to look at the Gnome Network Manager icon… 1 green spot… 1 grey spot… rotating fireball… at least the adapter is still working… and lo and behold… 2 green spots and now… full bars!
Yes, the WIFI wasn’t broken. I was using ndiswrapper in 8.04. I guess nothing in 8.10 broke it. I have however, seen many horror stories on the ubuntu forums. I was prepared for the worst.
I have a dual boot system with Vista Home Basic and Ubuntu. A month after installing 8.10 everything was fine. No problems at all with 8.10. Last week I decided to clean up and formatted the system! Its how I keep myself entertained. Make new partitions, decide the sizes, how much for WinVista, how much for Linux, etc. etc.
Display Problems
So I installed everything again. This time I installed 8.10 from the downloaded CD. I expected the install to be smooth and all the drivers to be detected. I was told that Artheros WIFI cards were better supported in 8.10. So when I got to the login screen, the display was in native and I had to enable the NVidia restricted drivers. That fixed the display problem.
WIFI
After logging in it was pretty apparent that the WIFI was not going anywhere. So I downloaded ndiswrapper and the requisite XP artheors drivers from their site. Did what I did last time and waited patiently for ndiswrapper to compile. It wouldn’t! I tried and I tried and then gave up. So then I started scouring the forums for help and came across this post on Madwifi.
I have used madwifi before. It was doing duty on 7.10 when I was using that. Then it didn’t work on 8.04 and now I was back to madwifi with 8.10. The post on ubuntuforums worked like a charm and I was able to connect to my home WIFI. The WIFI indicator light doesn’t work with madwifi though. It worked great with ndiswrapper. There is a workaround to get it to work but its not been tested on 8.10. So I will skip it for now. So, WIFI fixed!
That’s how I passed my time over the lasst weekend and it was fun.
Abhilash is a part time blogger and blogs about photography, technology and travel. When not blogging Abhilash is either selling outsourcing solutions to companies or indulging in marathon episodes of various science fiction shows and movies.
