[conspire] (forw) Re: Linux install at CABAL meeting

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:17:48 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: John Dwyer <juanito101 at gmail.com>
Cc: installers at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: Linux install at CABAL meeting
Reply-To: installers at linuxmafia.com
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting John Dwyer (juanito101 at gmail.com):

> However one of the comments regarding Mint prompted me to try that, so I
> downloaded and installed Mint 17.2. The best part is that it recognized my
> eth0, so I had wired internet.

Good job!  And, after a misadventure, you got that back.  Onwards to the 
wireless:

> As for the wireless card, " lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net" revealed
> 
> 0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g
> WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
>     Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card [1028:0007]
> Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

Well, yay.  Now, we're getting somewhere.  'BCM4311' was what we needed.

Instead of trying the default Broadcom-STA driver you mentioned -- the
one whose module name is 'wl', let's try the b43 driver, which in my
experience is much more reliable.  As you will see in these
instructions, you also end up installing a package called
'linux-firmware-nonfree', which is a set of binary-only firmware BLOBs
to initialise a broad range of hardware (sets of low-level instructions 
to enable those hardwre devices at power-on/startup time).

I'm betting that will work and _not_ disable your ethernet.

And if it does (and also if it doesn't), you're still extremely welcome
at Saturday's meeting.  For one thing, I'm a good cook.


----- End forwarded message -----