Kyle D. Skrinak

When Canonical released Karmic Koala, I didn’t hesitate to do the update-manager distribution upgrade. In the back of my mind, however, I knew that I was going to carry forward a bunch of cruft that had built up. The upgrade was successful, but I saw very little difference in basic features. so I decided to scrap the original and reinstall the Karmic as a new installation. I went with the 32-bit version (I’ll wait until a 64-bit flash binary becomes available for the 64-bit OS) I already have a /home partition separate from my main / partition. However, I switched from ext3 to ext4 and the conversion deleted all existing data (none of it was critical) I probably could have saved the data by doing an ext3 -> ext4 conversion independent of the installation.

So I hit a snag after the clean install: no wireless on my Broadcom 4311. I did what I always do when this happens. I checked Google and found various wild hairs, but no answer. Then, words of an old friend came back to me; “When the toaster isn’t working — check to see that it is plugged in.” Of course, there’s Occam’s razor, but enough analogies. The Dell 1520 laptop has a switch that toggles bluetooth and wifi, for power savings. The darn switch was off. I turned it on and there it was: WiFi.

After that, no problems yet. I’m experiencing much better overall performance. The hit was so bad that I’ve basically stopped using this laptop. There was something to how I configured MySQL and lighttpd and probably some other stuff — I’ll follow my own advice and do my LAMP stacks as VirtualBox machines, not on this machine itself. Now onto zsh, Adobe Air/TweetDeck, gvim, and so on.