The Twilight Sun

Having installed Ubuntu myself, I ran into a few annoying (but fixable) problems. I have an HP Pavillion dv900 series laptop, with the touch-sensitive media buttons and a built in wireless receiver. When I installed Ubuntu, I found that (a) my wireless connector wouldn’t work, and (b) that my audio wouldn’t work.

And later, when I fixed (b), I found that Pandora wouldn’t work either. Oh, the horror!

I talked with my Ubuntu-using friend again – knowing another Linux user is a great help! – and I found I had to use something called "ndiswrapper" to use the Windows drivers I had for Linux, to fix my wireless problems. Let’s see if I can dig up the link he gave me… Here it is. Starting from section 3.3, I followed the instructions, and it worked. The only problem is that the light next to the on/off switch for the wireless is always orange, it never turns green (on). But that doesn’t affect the fact that it works.

The audio problem… slightly trickier. I actually can’t remember what fixed it, but it was a pain to solve. I guess I wasn’t very helpful on this one.

And Pandora.com, the problem seemed to be that I didn’t have Flash installed, but when I installed it, it still didn’t work.. suffice to say, it was annoying to try to fix, but eventually I got it.

I can’t overstate the importance of being able to talk with someone else who has Ubuntu while doing this. It’s a huge help.