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).

After recompiling netatalk the other day in order to get it to work with Leopard, the next step was getting Time Machine to make backups over the network (and a wireless one by the way).

Problem is: despite the netatalk-powered network shares worked great for “regular” files, when Time Machine started preparing the backup it always gave me an error.

Googling about it I’ve found several stories with different soluctions, some of which worked for some people, some others didn’t. The one that did it for me is this one:

• Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard

Basically it consists in creating a “sparse bundle” disk image on the local hard drive using MacOS X’s Disk Utility, giving it a specific name, moving it to the network share and then configure Time Machine to use that share.

Worked for me.

At work I have a Dell laptop with a Broadcom BCM94311MCG wireless card:

# lspci
...
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)
...
# lspci -n
...
0b:00.0 0280: 14e4:4311 (rev 01)
...

The drivers that Ubuntu installs by default were giving me lots of headaches depending on the network’s access point: on some of them the card worked OK; on some others I kept loosing the connection every few minutes, or I couldn’t connect at all. I never found out if the problem was the encryption algorithm in use, or the wifi a/b/g/whatever protocol. Bottom line is the driver worked on some networks but didn’t on some others.

A co-worker told me he had the same problem until he switched to the ndiswrapper driver, so reluctantly I tried it. It work great.
More info here:

• Broadcom 43xx based wireless cards the EASY way
• Configurar Wifi para chipsets Broadcom Wireless (in spanish)