Belkin Wireless Cards on Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04

It seems my OS's have a configuration swap recently. I'm used to installing drivers on Windows, it's long been an accepted part of any reinstallation, I've toyed with slipstreamed CD's back when I first got XP but found the hassle of keeping them up to date was just not worth it so I just accepted the driver install process and got on with my life. Till I met Ubuntu, drivers were suddenly not needed (at least on this machine), everything worked. "Fantastic" thought I, I can't wait to try it out on my main PC. And that's where the dream was partially shattered. I'm not sure the exact reasons why some drivers are not included in the Ubuntu installations, but it appears to relate to whether the vendor is willing to release drivers to the Open Source community.
Either way, my Belkin card does not work out of the box on any Ubuntu version I have tried. Before someone says, try obscure-linux-version it works much bettter, why? I don't need to. I'm happy with Ubuntu everything that I want can be made to work with relative ease. Until I feel the need to switch, I'll stick with it. Anyway back to making my Belkin card work, it's based on the Broadcom BCM4306 chipset, in versions gone by installing the drivers was easy and just a matter of using the "Additional Drivers" app in Ubuntu. It seems that this time, it won't pick it up. Here's what I did:

1. Identify the card, open Terminal and type lspci | grep Wireless
2. My result was Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g ....etc, so I'm looking for the BCM4306 drivers for Ubuntu.
3. A google seach terms up this page from the Ubuntu documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx
4. Scrolling down to the relevant section, indicates that for 11.04 all I need to do is install firmware-b43-installer and everything will work. Right so let's do that...
5. Typing sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer in Terminal results in the usual installation stuff. The installer then sets about installing the firmware, it collects the correct package from openwrt.org and installs the driver.
6. Done! Clicking the network icon in the top right shows the various wireless networks that are available for me to connect to. Magic.

Ubuntu documentation and a nicely packaged installer are all it took to get it working.
On Windows XP, as I've mentioned, the Belkin driver package is required. However, Windows 7 supports the device straight out of the box (no configuration necessary). To me this seems like quite a switch, the days of driver installation are numbered it seems. Everything is getting just that little bit easier!

Dual Screens in Ubuntu 11.04

Dual screens are wonderful feature of modern day computing. Unfortunately setting them up isn't always so easy.

In Windows everything is very simple, point click done so long as all the drivers are installed. But that's the end of the easy part, there will only be one task bar by default and moving windows between monitors was a pain (at least until Windows 7 came along). In Linux, setting up required a little more work and certainly has a lot more configuration options but each monitor is a lot more configurable. Want two taskbars? No worries, just add a new one. Want another "start menu" (to use the Windows terminology)? No worries, just add a new one!

Currently, I use a nVidia 460GTX with 2x Acer P193W displays. nVidia are pretty good to the Linux community and have handily supplied the "NVIDIA X Server Settings" tool which can be used to configure all the aspects of your monitor.

Configuring the settings for my setup was dead simple:
1) Open the NVIDIA X Server Settings app
2) Select the X Server Display Configuration page
3) Select the disabled monitor and click Configure
4) Set the monitor as TwinView
5) Configure the position (in relation to the other screen)
6) Click Apply. You will be prompted that some settings won't take effect until XServer is restarted so go ahead and do that. If you don't know how, the easiest method is restarting the computer which is what I did.

When your computer boots up again you should be good to go! However, if you're like me and plugged your monitors in on the wrong ports (my right monitor is always available first and I need to enable the left monitor) don't despair. Initially the unity menu will appear on the right monitor, that's ok. In the NVIDIA X Server Settings app and on the page we used to configure the monitors, click the left monitor. At the bottom of the options there is a check box for Make this the primary display for the X screen, check it and click Apply. Again you'll need to restart the XServer or reboot your machine whichever you fancy. You'll notice that the login prompt is still displayed on the left screen, as soon as you login though everything will swap over.

Sharing Your Wireless Connection On Ubuntu 11.04

It's been over a year since the last post, but I'm hoping to rectify that and start posting more frequently. To bring the blog back to life I thought I would post a useful piece of information that I picked from the MakeUseOf site (article here). It all came about because my desktop pc has an obscure Belkin wireless card. This card, although reliable, is not supported out of the box by Ubuntu as the source for the drivers has not been released (at least that's how I understand it). Fortunately, with an active internet connect it is possible to install drivers using the "Additional Drivers" application. Unfortunately this meant a wired connection, which involves running a 30metre network cable downstairs to my router. Damn. Well on the offchance that I might actually be able to resolve this I had a quick google and sure enough I dound the MakeUseOf article above. It seems that Justin was in a very similar bind to me and needed to share his laptops wireless connection:

What I wanted to do was plug my client’s computers into my laptop and have them access the Internet. When I tried to search for how to share your wireless connection in this way, I mainly found a series of cryptic instructions ““ often revolving around the excellent Firestarter firewall ““ none of which worked for me on Ubuntu 9.10.

Luckily, he had also found the solution:

Step 1: Edit Network Connections On your top panel, beside your clock and your system icons, you’ll see your network indicator. When you’re connected to wireless, it features bars telling you the stength of your network connection. Right-click this, then click “Edit Connections.” Step 2: Edit The Ethernet Settings In the window you just opened, make sure you’re looking at the “Wired” tab. Then select the “Auto eth0” connection and click “Edit.” Alternatively you can create a new connection by clicking “Add” but I found it simplest to just change the default. Just be sure to remember that you changed this setting in case you ever want to use your Ethernet port to access the Internet again, because you will have to change it back to do so. Step 3: Set To Share Here’s where stuff starts to look confusing, but don’t panic: it’s not that bad. Click the “IPv4 Settings” tab. Beside the word “Method:” there is a drop-down menu that allows you to pick the manner in which your Ethernet device connects to the network. Select the “Shared to other computers” setting. Restart your computer. Assuming everything applied correctly, you should now be able to connect any computer to the Internet via your laptop’s Ethernet port.

Initially I was sceptical, as I had already tried that setting. However step 3 includes one piece of important information Restart your computer. Once restarted everything worked. I suspect the restart step is not necessary, restarting the networking processes with sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart would be sufficient but I'm not in a position to try. All credit should go to Justin Pot at MakeUseOf, for providing the steps. I'm now off to finish the installation and get all the software setup!