hello, hellm

I’d waited this long to upgrade to Edgy because I’d heard stories about X not working after upgrade (I’m rather partial to my graphical user interface) and I’ve spent some time wrangling with ndiswrapper and Network Manager to get my laptop’s internal Broadcom adapter working with WPA encryption, so I felt sure that would break.

Good thing I decided to try this on my laptop first. First, I had no X – despite that both xserver and ati support were installed. That meant that the fixes suggested for other users, installing or reinstalling those packages, wouldn’t work. Of course, I tried anyway, but to no avail. I decided to run the reconfigure wizard for xorg, and the conf file it created let me login to X. I haven’t looked at the files to determine the actual cause, but it’s clear that Edgy found something awry in the conf that worked with Dapper.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

And my wireless was gone. The culprit, as it so often is, is ndiswrapper. I tried a few approaches, but the one that seems to have done the trick (let me know if this doesn’t work, or if there’s a better solution):

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.8
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils-1.1

I was getting an error running modprobe ndiswrapper before this approach. Afterward, it ran successfully.

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

However, Network Manager couldn’t see my wireless card until I restarted X (restarting the Network Manager daemon and other network services wouldn’t do it). When X came back up, so did my wireless connection.
Success!