A wifi-connected laptop as a home server May 29, 2008
Posted by claudio in Uncategorized.Tags: GNU/Linux, Linux, Ubuntu, wifi, wpasupplicant
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As probably many people nowadays, I only have laptops at home. Actually one for me and one for my girlfriend (luckily babies don’t need laptops yet 
). As we made the move to laptops a long time ago, you end with older – perfectly fine – laptops. Similarly, I stopped making holes in the walls a long time ago and went wireless.
Laptop and wifi do not sound like a winning server combination, but for me they are. Happily, nowadays wifi is as easy in Linux as in Windows or MacOsX. But do you really want you laptop to use a graphical semi-interactive process to get it’s – often random – IP address? What if the machine will run without an X server?
wpasupplicant and the old manual network configuration come to the rescue. I use this configuration for my graphical over-sized living room divx/mpeg/flac/ogg/mp3-player laptop connected to my tv and stereo and non graphical print server (an old trusty amd 350mhz cpu with 160 mb ram and 4 gb disk) in the home office (far from the living room where we often work). (more…)
Broadcom wifi (BCM4312) speedup to 54mbit/s on Ubuntu 8.04 on a HP nc6320 laptop [Now FIXED on Ubuntu] May 21, 2008
Posted by claudio in Uncategorized.Tags: bcm4312, bcm43xx, nc6320, ndiswrapper, Ubuntu, ubuntu bug, wifi
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EDIT May 27th 2008: FIXED how to make the changes permanent.
EDIT June 4th 2008: Don’t forget to install as well linux-ubuntu-modules (in this case linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-14-generic) when upgrading your kernel.
EDIT Oct 16th 2008: The restricted driver included in Ubuntu has been FIXED and the card works out of the box when enabling it through System-Administration-Hardware Drivers. Thanks, Ubuntu!
It’s probably a regression: on this laptop the broadcom wifi worked fine on the previous Ubuntu releases (although limited to 24mbit/s) and now I see the speed is stuck to an unacceptable 1mbit/s. I guess that’s the price you pay for hardware from companies that are not open source friendly. (more…)
