Mike's Blabberings

After fighting with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 for months to get WIFI working, I finally found a Dell driver [0] that worked on my HP laptop through ndiswrapper [1].

A few hours later with success claimed, I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, assuming I had conquered all possible obstacles and that anything in the future would be pithy. Little did I realize, I was in for a world of hurt, as Ubuntu decided to muck with the guts of video/display drivers between 8.04 and 8.10.

After an initial upgrade, I was stuck with 800×600 resolution using the crappy built-in display drivers. I tried to activate the restricted Nvidia driver, but it hung and nothing happened. I went to Nvidia’s website, downloaded their open-source driver, installed it as they suggested, and rebooted. It looked great at first — the resolution was back to normal at the login window, but as soon as I logged-in, the screen went blank. Stumped, I pressed ctrl+alt+f1, then ctrl+alt+del to reboot. I went into the terminal, restored the original /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup, and was able to get back in, but back to 800×600.

Two full days later, I’ve finally got 1280×800 resolution back on my laptop. It appears that the auto-detected settings from Nvidia in my xorg.conf put in faulty horizontal sync and vertical refresh settings.

The proper settings are:

    HorizSync       30.0 - 110.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 150.0

With that, I was able to enable the nvidia driver and boot into gnome successfully.

Next, I decided to re-enable some desktop effects through the appearance manager. I opened it up, enabled the medium-level of effects, and immediately got the f$@#%%ng black screen!!! BLASTED!!! A reboot got me back to where I started.

This whole process is so frustrating. Luckily, xkcd can provide some comic relief…

So that’s where I’m at now. Hopefully I’ll figure something out soon, and update this post for any other HP laptop owners to reference.

Reference:
[0] Dell wifi driver that worked with the HP Pavilion dv2715nr’s 14e4:4315 Broadcom card ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe
[1] Instructions for ndiswrapper can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper