WiFi Joy: Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, Dell Inspiron 1720, Broadcom

I hope this will help a few people with similar configurations and pain as mine.

Support on Ubuntu, or Linux in general for that manner, for the Broadcom WiFi chipset has been pretty miserable in the past. I was forced to do pretty complicated rain dances around Windows drivers with NDISWrapper, and that worked for a while, up through the Hardy Heron Ubuntu release. Ever since I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex, I've had no wireless (not with any encrypted WAP, anyway). It's been pretty silly carrying our laptops to the conference rooms and negotiating over the few available wired LAN ports.

Well, Broadcom has finally released native support for Linux. Joy, almost! If you have the 2.6.26.x or 2.6.27.x kernels (which Intrepid is), you'll get compile errors like this:

/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c: error: too few arguments to function ‘iwe_stream_add_point’

Fear not, Chris Nolan has kindly provided a patch to fix that. It took me, on and off, a day of searching and going down dead-ends before discovering the right pointer, so I'm putting it here with all the relevant keywords: Linux, Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex, Broadcom, bcm4312, error, too few arguments, wl_iw.c, native, STA, b43, ssb, b44, hybrid, hybrid_wl.

Food Drive Success!

This is actually a plug for a good cause, replicated from our company blog.

Diane ran a Give-Back-This-Holiday-Season sprint with our team. It was as simple and fun as it was meaningful---we got to vote on our favorite consensus, which turned out to be the Food Bank of the Bay Area.

We collected donations, which was matched 1:1 from company coffers, then went shopping at Costco. This is something Alan E. does annually with the team at Google, too.

We chatted with Tometrius P. who runs the Second Harvest Food Bank center in San Carlos. The need is up sharply this year, which was expected. Somewhat unexpected was that donations were down. So please pass the word---you can truly make a real difference.