maybe this unbuntu thing isn't for me?

[Steve325]

after HOURS and hours. I finally got my video card working. I can't get my wifi working for the life of me. I simply don't understand how to install tar.gz files. Not only that, the creating packages thing confuses me to death.

I'm really debating if this is for me... I love the interface and performance of it. I was told by a few other people to just install OSX x86 on here... I've never heard of that

 

[Nothinman]

You shouldn't be messing with tarballs at all unless you've got some pretty obscure hardware. Just about all video cards should work out of the box and on the off chance that they don't or you just want to enable hardware acceleration you can install the non-free nVidia and ATI drivers via the package manager.

For wifi you might have to download some firmware and put it on the system for the driver to find (/lib/firmware I think) but that's about it these days too. Absolute worst case you have to setup ndiswrapper but there's packages for that too.

I was told by a few other people to just install OSX x86 on here... I've never heard of that

Chances are you'll have an even worse time with that since there's less drivers available for Darwin and running the non-free OS X stuff on top of it is illegal on non-Apple hardware.

 

[irishScott]

What are your specs?

 

[cipher00]

My wifi card (Linksys) would not work either (Broadcom chip - very flighty). I tried a Cisco card and it worked flawlessly. I've also heard that Mepis plays a bit better with hardward. FWIW.

 

[Nothinman]

My wifi card (Linksys) would not work either (Broadcom chip - very flighty). I tried a Cisco card and it worked flawlessly. I've also heard that Mepis plays a bit better with hardward. FWIW.

Hardware support should be largely the same, the main differences being whether or not they ship questionably licensed firmware and drivers and if they chose to include any drivers not yet included in the upstream kernel.

For your broadcom card the bcm43xx driver may support it once you get the firmware for it. I don't have any of those cards though so I don't know the exact procedure required.

 

[Fox5]

What version of ubuntu did you try? 7.10 (gutsy gibbon) is really good with hardware support in my experience.

 

[Mavtech]

For installing graphics cards, Envy rocks! I've used it on 3 graphics cards.

http://albertomilone.com/index.html

 

[TanisHalfElven]

go to ubuntuforums.org.
ask there.

also what gfx do you have ? and what wireless.
.tar.gz is a archive file like rar.
"installing" it is simply extracting and running. you should'nt do anything like this untill atleast some familiarity with linux.

ps. if you can see the interface you don't need to configure the gfx. atleast not for 2d things.