Alec the Geek

WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty No-Fluff - Community Ubuntu Documentation

Step 2b: sp33008 Driver Download/Extraction

First off I’d like to thank Broadcomm for being such a bunch of peasants as to make life hard for people not running operating systems from the West Coast USA.

Here is my contribution to the many, many, comments on the web on how to get the bmc wireless hardware working. Note that there seems to be a lot a variation in peoples’ experience — you would probably be advised to slaughter a chicken and sprinkle the warm blood over your laptop first (it can’t hurt)
ndiswrapper
I used the ndiswrapper route as the native OSS driver did not work for me. Also note that I am running KDE (kubuntu)

1. Download the latest driver package from hp.com. NB This is distributed as a Windows exe file but you can extract it using wine (sudo apt-get install wine), the file will end up in somewhere like ~/.wine/drive_c/SWSetup/SP34152A/
2. Make sure the native driver is disabled (instructions on URL above)
3. Run ndiswrapper -i … (as explained in URL above) but use the HP driver package you downloaded
4. In System settings/Network settings/ make sure the eth1 interface is configured for dhcp and then disabled.
5. Install KWiFiManager
6. Use kWifi Manager to confgure your WiFi connection and then activate it.

Please note that I did not follwo such a direct route so I have limited confidence this would work exactly as documented. I took me 3 days of fiddling around so please be patient.

Stardust Global Ventures » Nomadic Computing - Mobile? Casual? Or just evolution?

…many of us are becoming technology nomads, carrying less and less with us in our daily travels because we know where the oasis (of WiFI rather than water)…

Oh if only it was that easy in Australia. There are so few open WiFi spots here (mainly because if the high cost of net access) that it’s a real struggle to wander and work. There are a few pay per use services (e.g. Telstra) — however they can be very expensive. We are seeing a lot of 3G wireless services being pushed as well, but cost is again an issue and they are limited to business use.

Maybe one day we’ll get cheap pervasive networking here (I know it’s better that many places in the world, but for a modern economy it’s pretty poor)