Configure Broadcom Wireless Drivers

Getting the Broadcom Wireless cards to work with gnu/Linux was bit tricky. Even though linux kernel included the free software b43 driver for a long time, getting these wireless cards working needed some manual configuration. In this post I am testing Ubuntu Karmic and b43 driver to configure Broadcom BCM4311 Wifi card. .
$ lspci -vnn | grep 14e4
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:0465]
06:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1713] (rev 02)


To get started I used 'Hardware Drivers' to find and load the needed drivers. From main menus select System > Administration > Hardware Driver program or type ' sudo jockey-gtk ' in a terminal. The Hardware Drivers program found two drivers on this machine 'Broadcom B43 wireless Driver' and 'Broadcom STA wireless driver'. I selected the first and then pressed the 'Activate' button. The program connects to the Internet and downloaded the driver, so make sure you have a wired connection setup before hand.

After the driver was setup and rebooting the computer the wireless works perfectly with Network Manager.
Most people use Ubuntu LiveCD to try if their hardware is supported. As of writing this post the Ubuntu LiveCD doesn't configure and load the broadcom drivers automatically.

GDM Timed Login

The Gnome Display Manager(GDM) is the graphical login program for Gnome Desktop environment. It is being completely rewritten, one of its goals is to provide better accessible login support.

The latest version of GDM has been uploaded into Ubuntu Karmic and is under active testing. There are few issues to be ironed out before we can have a fully accessible login with orca screen reader and magnifier. Until then I advice the blind gnu/Linux users to use GDM timed login.

Add the following lines to your /etc/gdm/custom.conf file to enable GDM timed login. Replace 'user' with your username.
[daemon] AutomaticLoginEnable=true AutomaticLogin=user TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=user TimedLoginDelay=10
Please note that the configuration of GDM has moved away from previously single configuration file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf . As of now you can't use the graphic gdmsetup to configure GDM.

Ubuntu 9.04 UXA Graphics Acceleration

When I switched on my Karmic development laptop the X server reverted back to low-res. Guess its time to start UXA testing. Right now UXA is very unstable and presents strange problem like this one. The fonts are totally messed up in Firefox, Openoffice.org and gedit. Any ideas what might be the problem?

Update: 25 May, 2009 Found that this problem is triggered when I restart the computer from hibernation.

send a twitter messages from command line with bti

bti allows you to send twitter messages right from the command line. It works with both twitter.com and identi.ca. To use this program install the Ubuntu package with the same name (sudo apt-get install bti).

I was able to post a tweet message using bti within few minutes. The configuration is easy and straight forward. Have look at the bti example config file to get started quickly (/usr/share/doc/bti/examples/bti.example). The url shorting feature (with --shrink-urls option) however didn't work as intended though. Anyway its wonderful to be able to tweet from the command line, bti does have some pretty interesting features.
And don't forget to follow my tweets @playingwithsid.

About Bti micro-blogging command line tool

bti provides an easy way to send tweet messages direct from the command line or any script. It reads the message on standard input and uses the account and password settings either from the command line options, or from a config file, to send the message out.
It's primary focus is to allow you to log everything that you type into a bash shell, in a crazy, "this is what I´m doing right now!" type of way, letting the world follow along with you constant moving between directories and refreshing your email queue to see if there´s anything interesting going on.

Enable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace in Ubuntu

Here is one change in the latest Ubuntu release Jaunty (9.04) that is *really* not blind friendly. You can no longer use the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to restart the graphical (X) session by default. Most of the Orca screen reader users have to resort to using this key combination to start over when Orca screen reader stops or hangs for some unknown reason.

Its not very difficult to turn on this feature back on. To enable this Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination you have to use the dontzap program. You might want to install this package on your computer. They type this command in the terminal.
sudo dontzap -d
Reboot the computer and you are ready.

Update In Ubuntu Karmic the dontzap has been removed. You have use the keyboard preference tool.

• Select "System"->"Preferences"->"Keyboard"
• Select the "Layouts" tab and click on the "Layout Options" button.
• Select "Key sequence to kill the X server" and enable "Control + Alt + Backspace".