Posted August 7th, 2007, in: Technology| Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Linux| old iMac G3

UPDATE! PROBLEM SOLVED HERE

By the time I finally threw in the towel last night and decided to have a cocktail, I had in the neighborhood of 30 tabs open in firefox. All forum discussion threads discussing this whole issue with the bcm43xx chipset used by some wireless cards.

Ironically, most of the solutions being offered by the smarties in the forums involve:

A. Using the Synaptic Package Manager to download everything you need: ndiswrapper, ndiswrapper-utils, make (in order to use ndiswrapper), and a whole bunch of other dependancies…

B. going the fwcutter direction. Yada Yada.

The ironic thing about these idea is that it’s not an option to simply download these things from the repositories, if you don’t have an effin connection!

I tried both and find it really frustrating that there isn’t a fully functioning reliable version of Synaptic online!

I ended up downloading deb after deb finding that each level had numerous dependencies that I didn’t have.

Here’s a pic of the contents of my jump drive.

Part of my problem is that I don’t know jack about Linux. I’m not affraid of the command line, just new at it.

I will try to update this with how I finally end up solving this silly problem.

And I must say, the fact that this whole problem is a copyright issue over the firmware for these cards is amazing. Who cares about rights to their stupid firmware?

The reason I’m going with Xubuntu 6.06 and not 7 is because the BIOS of this PC is 1999 and I couldn’t get ANYWHERE trying to upgrade that, not even to thirty open browser tabs of non-helpful forum threads and a flash drive full of useless junk!

Heading over to a friends house to see if I can use his Synaptic to get the packages I need along with all the dependancies.

I will update if I get this piece of shit working

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