Howdy! I'm a happy camper, since I just got the Wireless working (mostly) on my Vostro 1500 Laptop with Ubuntu 7.1. The laptop has the 'wireless-N' (next-gen) built-in A/B/G/N wireless card. I saw/tried many help/howtos from ubuntuforums, google search, etc, with not much help.

However - with a combination of stuff culled from the web, here's how I got it working:
1. Got the 4th driver listed from this page (gentoo linux forum)
... Repackaged Newer Dell Driver (just the files you need)
2. unpacked above into a directory in linux
3. sudo synaptic (or sudo apt-get install ) ndisgtk
4. sudo ndisgtk
5. (inside ndisgtk) install the new driver (bcmwl5.inf)
6. (inside ndisgtk) apply network encryption. I settled for WEP for now, but supposedly works all the way up to WPA2 (I'm doubtful)
7. tried static IP of 192.168.x.x, but DHCP worked, and that's easier anyway
8. sudo ifdown wlan0; sudo ifup wlan0
--- tada! working wireless, and I'm even getting my full 5Mb/s---

Hope this helps someone (let me know!). I probably spent about 12hours over the past few days getting this working.

Other stuff - obviously, I got the dual-boot working (vista, why!?) and Ubuntu. Now I could consider working on Lua again. Although at work, I'm again forced to use Perl, which looks how I feel when I'm coding in it ($_#%!)

I must admit it, I flirted with Lua for several months. It's pretty spiffy, nicer in some ways than python. However, I found that luaSocket had some issues running on Vista, that I did not want to delve into to fix. Why Vista? With a new laptop which supports DX10, it might be nice to run a dx10 game sometime (and for now, at least until M$oft kills vista, XP won't get DX10)

So, back to python; SPE as an IDE still works well, even though it was last updated long ago.


Nice things about Lua:

• very small compared to python
• everything is first class
• hash (associative array) for everything
• MIT license
• clean/readable/maintainable syntax (eat that, ruby/perl fans!)... though space is not significant like our beloved python
• lots of addons available (socket, web, sqlite, etc)
• somewhat of a de facto scripting language in many games nowadays (World of Warcraft being the biggest one I saw)

Happy Coding. Later.