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Some days the penguin poops on you
My home laptop has a Broadcom 4318 wireless card. This accursed card seems to be generally problematic for Linux users everywhere; there's a bcm43xx native Linux driver that honestly just doesn't work very well, or you can try the ndiswrapper song-and-dance. To make things worse, I run native AMD64 Linux, so if I use ndiswrapper I need to cough up a 64-bit Windows driver for the card. But such things do exist on the Internet.
Things got bad when I upgraded to Ubuntu Edgy Eft; the bcm43xx driver outright hung with the provided 2.6.17 kernel, and the ndiswrapper userspace needed some hand-holding. Fixing ndiswrapper worked, briefly, until I added more memory. Now I have 2.6.17, 2.6.19, and 2.6.20 kernels. Something in the 2.6.20 kernel changed to break ndiswrapper and Ubuntu Flighty doesn't have a fix for it. 2.6.19 with ndiswrapper works, usually, but sometimes it doesn't and it's still somewhat prone to randomly freezing. On (32-bit) Windows it seems to work pretty reliably.
I can't figure out what causes the system to sometimes work and sometimes not, and I'm not really up for doing kernel-level debugging. All I know is that this morning the system would repeatedly go into la-la land, either locking up with flashing caps lock light before X came up or successfully starting but hanging after maybe five minutes. Power-cycling is the only answer, and doesn't really help anything. This happened one day last week too, but I spent a couple of hours working on IAP class slides yesterday and it was all fine.
Bleah.
Edit: More hunting around believes that bcm43xx just isn't there, particularly on Broadcom 4318 cards. Both drivers have their share of current bugs, but some involve having more than 1 GB of RAM. Which I do now. And work experience of "driver/hardware loses high bits of address" is actually consistent with what I'm seeing. Workaround (successful for 5 minutes so far!): boot with mem=1024M.
Things got bad when I upgraded to Ubuntu Edgy Eft; the bcm43xx driver outright hung with the provided 2.6.17 kernel, and the ndiswrapper userspace needed some hand-holding. Fixing ndiswrapper worked, briefly, until I added more memory. Now I have 2.6.17, 2.6.19, and 2.6.20 kernels. Something in the 2.6.20 kernel changed to break ndiswrapper and Ubuntu Flighty doesn't have a fix for it. 2.6.19 with ndiswrapper works, usually, but sometimes it doesn't and it's still somewhat prone to randomly freezing. On (32-bit) Windows it seems to work pretty reliably.
I can't figure out what causes the system to sometimes work and sometimes not, and I'm not really up for doing kernel-level debugging. All I know is that this morning the system would repeatedly go into la-la land, either locking up with flashing caps lock light before X came up or successfully starting but hanging after maybe five minutes. Power-cycling is the only answer, and doesn't really help anything. This happened one day last week too, but I spent a couple of hours working on IAP class slides yesterday and it was all fine.
Bleah.
Edit: More hunting around believes that bcm43xx just isn't there, particularly on Broadcom 4318 cards. Both drivers have their share of current bugs, but some involve having more than 1 GB of RAM. Which I do now. And work experience of "driver/hardware loses high bits of address" is actually consistent with what I'm seeing. Workaround (successful for 5 minutes so far!): boot with mem=1024M.