Wireless on the Laptop with Linux Mint

My experiments today involve using the laptop's wireless networking facilities with Linux Mint 4.0 (based on Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty). I had written earlier about the same attempts on Ubuntu 7.04, but found that those instructions no longer work (a URL involved in the configuration is no longer working).

Anyway, here's what I did:

(Note that I used a wired network connection during this configuration.)

First, this page outlined the steps to download and activate the restricted driver for the BCM4311 wireless chipset. Not too tough.

Unfortunately, the wireless didn't jump to life when I yanked the wire. The next step was to turn off the roaming mode and configure the network. I opened the Network Settings dialog and selected Properties on the wireless connection. After unchecking the Enable Roaming Mode box, I entered the network name (case sensitive!), password type (mine is WEP Key hexidecimal), and the network password (mine is ... hey!). I also selected Automatic Configuration (DHCP) under Connection Settings. I clicked OK and things were good!

Obviously, your settings will vary.

With roaming mode off, I guess I will have to reconfigure for each network I use. That will be the subject of a later experiment.

UPDATE: I almost forgot, use the iwlist eth1 scan command to search for wireless networks in your area. (Substitute your Ethernet adapter name for 'eth1', or leave it out to try them all.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: I'm having a tough time reproducing this configuration. In six tries, I've connected to the wireless network twice. (I even tried it with the standard issue Ubuntu 7.10 instead of Mint.) I can't really say what made it work, except possible reentering the wireless password. Probably not that.

It's tough to say that I would like to dump Vista for Linux, as I did XP on the old machine, since Vista just seems to work on this laptop. Sure, it's slow and there's the fear of viruses, trojans, worms, etc, but I was happy to come back after playing with the Mint Live CD today. I'll still setup a dual boot soon, just to play, and it may even become my primary operating system at some point, but I'm not taking Vista off quite yet.