My laptop which is HP 520 with Intel Celeron 1.6, 80 G Hardisk, 1 G of RAM, Integrated Intel 945GM, Intel LAN Card, Broadcom 943xx mPCI and HDA.
Installing Mandriva 2008 on the laptop with KDE doesn’t take long. It is only 30 minutes. I use Mandriva 2008 Free from InfoLinux magazine. A standard desktop as other linux distro with KDE but with some configured peripherals . The videocard work out of the box with 3D support (checked with glxinfo in terminal) and the HDA soundcard also work with one problem, I can’t use the external microphone but the sound is ok. The screen resolution is set up perfectly at 1820X800.
Some devices that don’t work at standard installation is the wLAN, Broadcom bcm43xx. It is actually can be set up easily with the firmware-cutter. Modem doesn’t seem to be recognized as it is related to the soundcard.
The solution of the problems is Broadcom wLAN can be set up with the firmware but it is only with 11MHz of speed not 54 MHz. The alternative is using ndiswrapper. The good thing of Mandriva is that it gives you choice in the Mandrake Control Centre to use ndiswrapper and the native driver of bcm43xx. Choose ndiswrapper and point to the bcmwl5.inf in the Win** CD driver. Then find the blacklist.mdv in /etc/modprobe.d. Add blacklist bcm43xx. rmmod bcm43xx, and do ndiswrapper -ma to add ndiswrapper in modprobe.d so that it will load ndiswrapper after reboot.
Reboot your computer and check if it works with the command iwconfig. The light of wLAN should now flashing or on to indicate that it is available. Set up your network connection with netapplet. It should now detect the access points around and connect to one of them.
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