Setting Up Wireless in Ubuntu is Hit or Miss

Earlier this month, I made a news post discussing some fresh changes unveiled with the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04 (also referred to as Jaunty Jackalope). I’ve been using the latest OS on my notebook a fair bit since then, and I have to say, this is easily the best version of Ubuntu I’ve used to date, and it may well be the best version of an easy-to-deploy Linux that I’ve used to date as well. It installed easy, and has been working like a charm since.

Because my “netbook” doesn’t have an ODD, I installed the OS using a thumb drive. That process in itself is a little complicated, but another option would have been to install it from within Windows. But regardless, on the first boot, everything was working just fine, except for one thing… the wireless. This actually surprised me, because from what I recall, Ubuntu 8.04 detected the wireless just fine on the initial boot.

If I have a major gripe against Ubuntu, it’s the fact that minor things can change from release to release like this. Ubuntu 8.04, for example, booted up just fine on the dv2. Ubuntu 8.10 did not (in all fairness though, this could have been due to the thumb drive method I used, even though it’s the same for all releases). Then again, with Ubuntu 9.04, it boots up just fine, but the wireless doesn’t work. Luckily enough though, getting the wireless to function was unbelivably easy.

After I booted up with the thumb drive, I let the desktop sit for a minute, at which point a pop-up came up and told me I needed to enable a driver in order to use the wireless. Ahh, so there it is. The reason the wireless doesn’t work, is due to the proprietary nature of the driver. Why it worked just fine in an earlier release, though, I have no idea. Either way, after I chose to enable the “Broadcom STA wireless driver” and clicked “Activate”, I was online within two minutes (it had to download and install the driver via my wired connection).

That’s all fine and good. I was able to browse the Web while the install took place (the install took exactly 12 minutes, and resulted in 2.6GB being used on the HDD). Once the install was done, I rebooted and went into my newly-installed desktop environment. No surprise, my wireless didn’t work (changes to the Live CD are not reflected in the final install, and rightfully so). This time, though, simply plugging in the LAN cable and downloading the driver didn’t work, because Ubuntu didn’t come out and tell me like before that I needed to enable the driver.

After plugging in the LAN cable, and updating the entire OS through the built-in updater, something clicked, and I was able to see that a proprietary driver needed to be enabled. Once again, two minutes later, I was online via my wireless. The process wasn’t entirely as smooth as I had hoped, but it’s still a lot better than it could have been. As 2Tired2Tango mentioned in our forums not long ago, sometimes Ubuntu won’t even pick up the wireless driver at all, but this might be limited to Atheros. Either way, Ubuntu 9.04 impresses me quite a bit, and it’s reinvigorated my Linux spirit to some degree. It’s been quite a while since I’ve last touched OpenSUSE, Fedora and others, so something tells me I’m going to have to do that soon…