No wireless networks with Easynote laptop and Ubuntu 11.04

I assume that all of these laptops use the broadcom wireless adapter but to check open a terminal and type:
sudo lshw -C network
The ethernet and wireless interface information will be shown.

If you indeed have a broadcom interface connect to the internet via an ethernet cable and open the Synaptic Packet Manager and install b43-fwcutter then firmware-b43-installer or open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

Remove the the ethernet cable and restart Ubuntu and the wireless network should be available.

Packard Bell Easynote HR11 and Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

I recently bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on it. As usual I will blog about any issues as and when they arise.

The laptop I bought is a Packard Bell Easynote HR11 and the first thing I did was to reduce the Windows partion. To do this I used the partition manager in windows 7 rather than risk using GParted with a Windows partition. I don’t know if this is necessary but I thought it was better to be safe than sorry and the tool is available for free in the Windows 7 anyway. A good Howto on shrinking the Windows partition is here

After shrinking the Windows partition I changed the BIOS boot order to make the DVD boot first and then inserted the Ubuntu 11.04 DVD and booted the laptop via the DVD.

From the menu I chose “install Ubuntu” and the installation started. There was a problem with choosing a keyboard during the installation and the installation hung if I chose anything other than a USA keyboard, so in the end I accepted the USA keyboard and the installation completed successfully. This keyboard issue was still giving me problems for a while after installation but I fixed it like this. After removing the DVD and re-booting I got the Grub menu with both Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 as options plus some emergency recovery options. Ubuntu is the default and will run if you press enter or wait for 10 seconds.

My first disappointment was that the new desktop Unity didn’t start but instead I got Gnome. The reason for this lies in the Nvidia Optimus technology which switches from the Intel to the Nvidia GPU when more graphics power is required. I have managed to fix this problem for now but I still see room for improvement. You can read the blog about this here.

The second problem was the fact that the WLAN wasn’t working. I have blogged about how I solved this problem here.