Jompeich d’er Bisente

I’ve just upgraded the laptop I use at work (a Dell Inspiron 6400) to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. The upgrade process in itself went like a breeze, but after rebooting I’ve had two issues:

• The touchpad wouldn’t work. In the end I’ve commented out all the Synaptics configuration from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, both the “InputDevice” block and the line on the “ServerLayout” block. I’ve left only the “standard” mouse driver config pointing to /dev/input/mice, that gets all the Touchpad events too (the scrolling wouldn’t work but at least the touchpad itself does… I’ll have to further look into this).
• The wifi card didn’t work either. I’ve been using it with ndiswrapper, as the old bcm43xx driver gave me problems with some wireless networks. Now neither driver was working, and there were lots of messages from a new “b43” driver complaining that I should go to the LinuxWireless site and download a new firmware from there. So I’ve done it, following the firmware installation instructions there, and now the wireless interface is working again (I still haven’t tested it against some of the networks that gave me problems in the past with the bcm driver).