Where do I find a Linux driver for my laptop's wireless card?
Okay. I went and gone and dunnit! Now that I’m fully on my new Win 7 desktop machine, I blew away XP on my laptop and installed Ubuntu 9.10. XP was so painful to use that I didn’t even bother to set up dual-boot—I blew it away completely. No regrets! Of course, there’s a few problems. Ubuntu can’t connect to my wireless network. I suspect it can’t see the built-in wireless card because the network light on the edge of the laptop won’t come on, even if I press the little button that turns it on and off (which was useful in XP when I wanted to isolate the machine from the network). It’s an HP Pavilion ZE4900. Any idea? Links?
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Can you enter “lshw -C network” in the terminal for us?
I don’t know what that command did, but it worked! Ubuntu recognises my wireless network card now! w00t! Thanks!
Haha, nice :) Congrats on the switch ;-)
Welcome to the land of Penguin Power :)
Any reason you went with 9.10 instead of the 10.4 LTS? I mean, it’s easy to update/upgrade, but I am just curious.
@HungryGuy: Heh. Inadvertently solving problems FTW!
that’s like when I had this problem, I jacked into ethernet and linux said, “O HAI, U WANTS DRIBERS?” I was like, “O YEZ I’D LURVE DRIVERS!” and it installed all the drivers automatically that I’d need to search about the internet for if I used Windoze.
@unused_bagels – Yes! That’s pretty much what Ubuntu did for me :-) Only Ubuntu used correct english…
@jerv – I went with 9.10 simply because that’s what Canonical sent me when I asked for a free disk. BTW, I would have gladly paid for it, but my choice was to ask for a single free disk, or buy a package of 100 or more. I didn’t need 100 copies of Linux, so I asked for the free one.
@HungryGuy Ah. Well, I installed 9.04 from a free CD a while back and let it update itself to 9.10 then 10.4, and my roomate has a habit of downloading the ISO of the latest version within a week of release. With a 1024/384 connection, the update goes pretty quickly while downloading the ISO takes a few hours. He does it while we sleep and it’s done in the morning.
@jerv – I might or I might not. I’m still tweaking 9.10, and coaxing Linux to play nice with my multi-function printer and all that, so I’m not inclined to rush into upgrading any time soon…
@HungryGuy The new Software Center is different. Maybe better, maybe not (matter of opinion, really) but I will say that I had zero issues getting 9.10 to connect to my wireless HP 4750, at least for the printer function. (I haven’t tried the scanner yet)
@jerv – I would expect HP printers to work very well with Linux: HPLIP.
If the printer isn’t HP, expect many more problems, like monochrome printing only, or font rendering issues (both from personal experience, although not for a year as I haven’t needed a printer for a year and consequently don’t have one).
My laptop is HP, but my printer is Canon. I got it to print, but I haven’t tried using the scanner or any of the advanced functions yet.
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