About almost a year ago I bought a laptop, a Compaq Presario V3206AU. It came with Windows Vista Home Basic Edition. Even though in the first place I want to install linux on the laptop, I tempted to play around with Vista. I like Vista appearance. It’s elegant. I use Vista for a few months. I started feel uncomfortable to Vista, because somehow the interface confused me. Unlike its elder brother, Windows XP. I felt I need to learn about the OS like to learn a whole new OS. And this feeling made me more eager to learn linux. Why I need to learn Vista, if I can learn linux with almost the same effort?
At that time PCLinuxOS 2007 was very famous (I think until now still very famous). I installed PCLinuxOS 2007 on my laptop. I installed many applications into the laptop, including VMWare Player to access Windows XP for my work. I activated beryl on my laptop. It was amazing. Everything is perfect. Almost. Except my wireless. My wireless was not working! The wireless is broadcom 4328. Later I found out that this device is not so Linux-friendly. I tried to find a solution in PCLinuxOS forum, but cannot find a ny. And then, later I tried to find in Ubuntu forum. I was hoping the solution in Ubuntu can be applied in PCLinuxOS. I cannot remember which forum, but in the end I ended up downloaded R151517.EXE, and using the bcmwl5.inf. At last after I did many experiment I could access internet through my wireless. I was very happy. But, I was not happy for long. The system crashed/hang. The system was not stable. I wanted to replace PCLinuxOS with other OS, but I didn’t have any good preferences. So, I used the laptop without maximized my wireless.
A few months ago I updated my PCLinuxOS. After I restarted my laptop, my laptop cannot display properly, until I fixed the display using command line. Not only that, beryl, wine, and 3D games are not working. The sound device and ethernet were missing. These conditions forced me to replace my PCLinuxOS 2007 with a new Linux OS. After a few time trying different flavor of linux distro, I ended up with Linux Mint.
I accidently found a very good article written by Micah Carrick. Actually this article is meant for Ubuntu, but because Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based, the method in the article is applicable with Linux Mint. I don’t know whether this method can be applied with other linux distro (I haven’t tried it). Now I’m writing this blog using Linux Mint through my wireless connection. And, the OS isn’t hang or crashed. I can say it is very stable. I don’t mean that PCLinuxOS 2007 is a bad OS. Maybe I did something wrong with the setting in the OS, that made some problems with the OS. I intend to give a try this OS again with it’s next version.
