Just a short rant here on linux: Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan. The more I use it the more I like it. Mainly Ubuntu. Both the server and the desktop version, are for me, very good and very straightforward. The server version more so than the desktop though.

The one thing that I can't figure out is why it's so damn hard to get wireless running on the desktop versions. I know that in some cases it just works right out of the gate, but for me no matter what laptop I install Ubuntu (any version really) the wi-fi is an epic PITA! I dont' see how linux will ever be adopted on a large scale if this isn't rectified. Most people are not going to want to apt-get a bunch of stuff, or wget + rpmbuilt, etc, etc. It's just too much work.

Either way, linux is drastically better now compared to a few years ago, so maybe a few years from now this will be a non-issue, but right now: it's frustrating.

Luckily there are many many people much smarter and more experienced with linux than I am, so when you do have a problem there is usually a solution already in place. The hard part is finding it!

Here's the short version of how to setup wireless on a dell mini 9 running the newest version of Moblin (v2).

This information was gleened from: http://slaine.org/_slaine/Dell_Mini_9.html

1) Activate the moblin toolbar and select the applications icon
2) Choose the Accessories section and select Terminal
3) Install the various tools you’ll need : sudo yum install rpmdevtools
4)Install the compilers and other tools: sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
5)Install the kernel-netbook-devel package: sudo yum install kernel-netbook-devel
6)Now we’re ready to build and install the new broadcom drivers: wget
 http://slaine.org/files/moblinv2/wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm
    rpmbuild --rebuild --target=i586 wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.src.rpm
7)Install the resulting rpm:
sudo rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i586/wl-kmod-5.10.91.9.3-1.moblin.i586.rpm

For me, this worked 100% the first time. Just be sure you do all of the steps in the order presented and you should be fine. For safe measure i did a sudo reboot after the proceedure and VIOLA! The wireless adapter showed up.
 


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