The recent release of the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta prompted me to investigate, and run the dist-upgrade. The Gutsy Gibbon beta release and subsequent upgrades was a relatively painless process, and Ubuntu gets better with every release.

Two things that did concern me, as they seem to impact every time I upgrade, were the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and the Broadcom wireless. Luckily, the upgrade took care of the NVIDIA drivers fine (although I haven’t tested out World of Warcraft yet), but as expected the wireless totally failed to work.

A little investigation threw up instructions (also enumerated on other sites) on how to use fw-cutter to install new drivers.

In the interest of documentation, here’s the process I used to re-enable wireless on my Compaq Presario F500 laptop:

Starting in my /home/ directory, I created a Drivers/wireless directory - I always hang on to old drivers just in case.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
mkdir Drivers/wireless
cd Drivers/wireless/
wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" wl_apsta.o

A quick reboot, all was well!

I’m still investigating all the new things in Hardy Heron - so far Firefox 3 is the only thing I’ve really used, and I’m not entirely convinced yet…

Update
Seems that the B43 driver isn’t the best yet, and a rollback to ndiswrapper was in order.