Don't be too hard on yourself, this sort of stuff happens all the time. Even for those of us who use Linux on a regular basis, this kind of stuff rears its head from time to time. Personally, I suffer from a nameless syndrome where I figure out my problem about 10 minutes after I post the question.

Absolutely not. There will be someone coming along later who has also forgotten to turn the card on. If anything, you might want to edit the first post to add a warning to check the card, but by no means should you delete this. Besides, only Jeremy can actually delete threads and as far as I can tell the only ones that are delete are spam.


Glad its working and hopefully that will be the biggest Linux problem you find!

Hey from what I see all was not wasted, you did learn how to use terminal and different commands. The last wireless install I did I miss read the name of the module and fought the install for a day before the light came on.

Thank you both, Hangdog42 and Larry Webb, for your encouragement. I have certainly walked a baby step on the Linux road with the helpful advice I received. I am becoming more and more happy with using Ubuntu Linux. (But I did another stupid thing: I loaded Adobe Reader when there was already the PDS reading software loaded with Ubuntu.)

I'm glad you're getting the hang of Ubuntu, but man, you gotta stop being so hard on yourself. I've got at least 3 different programs on my computer to read PDFs! One of the most fun parts of Linux and Open Source software (at least in my opinion) is that there are frequently several options to do the same, or similar, things. I know this level of choice can turn off a lot of people, but in the long run it means some really good stuff gets developed because so many different ideas are being tried.

So go ahead and experiment, you never know when you'll find a program that just clicks for you.

[QUOTE=Hangdog42;3190371]This is the wrong conclusion to be drawing from your experience. The problem you're facing is that Broadcom refuses to support Linux in any way, so the drivers have been reverse engineered and are more than a bit touchy. In other words, the problem isn't you, it is your hardware.

So what to do? I'd take one of two paths (both of which are much cheaper than paying Canonical):

1) Dump b43 and try the ndiswrapper driver. This is a driver that allows the use of Windows drivers in Linux and with Broadcom chipsets it has been pretty successful.

I believe most of what Hangdog says except the buy a new card. If you install ndiswrapper according to the directions and make sure and remove the b43 drivers and blacklist them from booting (there are numerous articles describing the procedure). I have done two Dell laptops in the past month and I downloaded the latest driver from the Dell website and the second time was easy. The first time was harder, I sometimes think I can skip some of the directions such as blacklisting the bw43 driver and had a conflict.