I recently purchased a Dell laptop (Inspiron 1150 for the google crawler) and tonight took the plunge to scrap my Windows install and start fresh. I partitioned Win to take up the first half and Ubuntu to take up the 2nd half. I re-installed Windows first with no problems, downloading the drivers from Dell on my workstation, burned to CD, and got everything working.
From past experience I assumed Linux would be the more difficult. So I had already written down the list of hardware that is on my laptop ready to install and set up each one.
While Ubuntu installed and rebooted I was surfing the web on my desktop computer when I saw the screen flicker and heard a start up sound. I was presented with a nice Ubuntu login screen and my sound card was already working. The installer also detected my ethernet card and that was working on startup as well. Trackpad was working fine. The only thing it didn't get was the wireless. But literally here are the steps I needed to get it working...
1. Install ndiswrapper via synaptic package manager
2. ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf (I had researched this so had the forthought to know which files to copy from the Windows installer)
3. modprobe ndiswrapper
4. In Gnome, go to Administration -> Networking and configure the card for my access point.
I was done in about an hour, and with less clicks and license agreements and time than Windows. Very nice.
-Rob _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
