Ubuntu 9.10 Wireless on Dell Precision M6300

For reasons too complex to go into (they involve a talking penguin) I have just installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) 32-bit on the laptop I was talking about when I wrote this post last June.

Whether it's the change to 32-bit or the change to Karmic I do not know, but I am happy to report that everything works like a dream: I just had to install the BroadCom proprietary driver (boo! - I wish companies like Nvidias and BroadCom would cooperate more fully with the open source world) and suddenly I could disconnect the wires and away I went. This post is being made from the very laptop about which I complained so bitterly eight months ago.

Ubuntu 9.04 Wireless on Dell Precision M6300

The best laid plans of mice and men have yet again gone agley. For a couple of years now I have been running Vista on my Precision workstation. In order to move to the Linux platform I bought a 320 GB 2.5" disk (amazing value at $90) and planned to install Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on it then migrate the Vista disk to a VirtualBox virtual machine accessing a raw patition which contained a Ghost copy of the original Windows partition.

Alas I couldn't get the virtual to boot, and anyway the Vista load is starting to show signs of instability (hardly surprising in a Windows installation that's been poked and prodded as heavily as mine has), so I have bitten the bullet and am reinstalling Vista from scratch with a virtual filesystem. The partition that was going to host Vista is now an ext4 filsystem which can host whatever I want or need to put on it. I have installed VirtualBox, and Vista loaded up like a champ.

The only (current) fly in the ointment is that for the life of me I can't get wireless networking to work. Unfortunately Command Line Idiot appears to be right when he or she writes:

There are roughly 19 billion tutorials for how to do anything you would ever want to do with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, they are all written by a 12 year old who knows even less than you.

Some of the advice I have seen is so cryptic as to be incomprehensible, some refer to drivers I don't have and don't seem to be able to download, the majority of it its either apparently irrelevant or clearly wrong.

So, crazy fundamentalist or not, I'll be happy to hear from you if you can tell me how to get the wireless networking going.

Help Files Should Help, Right?

Microsoft Documentation Sucks
God knows I've had my complaints about Microsoft documentation in the past. Often about manuals consisting mostly of descriptions of the following nature:

Threep Nardling
To nardle threeps, select the Threep tab and check the Nardling checkbox.

Frankly this kind of documentation is worse than useless - it elevates statement of the bleeding obvious to new heights, and frustrates all users with at least one eye and half a brain. If you don't know what a threep is, or when it might usefully be nardled, the implication is that you are in the wrong place (though quite where else you would be expected to go for this information escapes me).

Ubuntu/Gnome Documentation Sucks
That said, I hope I am setting myself up for a fall here. I've just installed a number of Ubuntu 8.04 virtuals (because I want to be compatible with a client environment, since you ask), and I have been having problems getting the network interfaces to behave. So I go to the help file for the GUI-based networking tool so kindly provided, and the main portion is filled with this sort of idiocy:

The really annoying piece is that I went to the help file to try and get an understanding of the roaming mode, only to discover that this steaming pile of placemarkers* masquerading as documentation contains zero mention of the one interface feature I needed to know about. They could at least have had a section saying "Check this box to put the interface into roaming mode".

I am really hoping that this documentation has improved a lot in the two versions of Ubuntu that have been released since 8.04. If not, then it's time somebody (either at the Gnome Foundation or at Canonical) started to give some serious attention to documentation. Help files that don't help are a major source of end-user frustration.

Somebody, please put me out of my misery and tell me that this nonsense is gone in more recent releases. Otherwise I might just have to go home and bang my head against the wall.

The Real Problem
All of this is merely subsidiary to the real issue, which is how to I get a VirtualBox Ubuntu guest running under a Windows Vista host to track changes in the Vista internet connectivity. It seems like every time I change locations I have to spend time tweaking settings on the virtuals, rebooting uselessly and generally poking things until I get them to work without any clear idea of the eventually successful strategy.

So, dear lazyweb, please help me. If there's a manual that explains this I'd be happy to make a donation to its author. The open source world should, in my less than humbe opinion, value good documentation as much as (or more than) good code. Once you get past the obvious, the docs help you more than the code.

* Admit it, you though I was going to write "dung" there, didn't you? I am trying to eschew the obvious.

Mark Shuttleworth at OSCON

Mark, an accomplished speaker, started by confessing that he had no doubt that Linux would be the platform of the future, and suggesting that tools like Firefox and bazaar had claimed ownership of their application space by providing extensibility in a modular way: conform to the interfaces, and the application becomes a platform. All the same, he insisted there is also a need to work with Windows (which makes sense since there are so many Windows systems around).

One of the issues Mark discussed was how we can extend agile techniques in ways inspired by community-driven processes. Architecting your tool set and your enterprise for collaboration and communication is essential. Ubuntu's governance is entirely separated from Canonical's, and Mark suspects that might turn out to be a best practice.

Tools must be extensible, and whether they are open source or proprietary they must be usable as components in diverse systems. The ultimate goal is "permissionless" development - new people coming in wanting to do new things need to be able to take the tools and run with them to implement their own ideas. His ideal for Ubuntu is for any developer worldwide to branch the Ubuntu code and publish their version in ways that other people can in turn pick up and run with.

Another best practice Mark has identified is time-based releases, which lend a rhythm to the development process and allow developers to keep track of what's happening in the trunk, which should be releasable at any time. More and more projects are thinking about synchronizing their releases. Imagine if a multitude of Linux distributions could collaborate to release at the same time, providing a "development cadence", encouraging individual tool developers to finalize their own releases for incorporation into a multitude of distributions.

Mark sees todays open source development world as struggling to provide free software, but the questions is how will the economic models support this? Free software is easy to love: it costs nothing to acquire. But who will fund the development of the free software? This will require innovations in economics that will, with a historical perspective, possibly be one of the more significant changes in these turbulent times. Having three almost-monopolies each controlling their own distribution would be counter-productive, and advertising on the desktop is offensive.

At Canonical they are hiring people to work on the desktop to build tools that benefit the providers of services. This will fundamentally change the world.

The challenge of the next two years is to lift the Linux desktop to a level where it is effectively art! How do Linux distributions not emulate Apple, but blow right past them. Jamie Zawinski says we should be aiming to build software tools that help their users get laid! The only doubts Mark had about that as a goal were related to Jamie's stated goal of making software that his mother could use ...

The Web 2.0 explosion has taught us that to survive in the web world a software product needs to be instantly attractive, and deliver functionality immediately in a profoundly usable way. Canonical have been investing in the process and the technology, and they are now trying to
realize the dream that Mark so elegantly elucidated in his presentation.