Several months ago I bought myself a HP Pavillion dv6525em, because my ageing Apple G4 Powerbook had become simply to weak for today's computing requirements (needles to say I was unable to play Q3A and RA2 with my housemates!

Of course it came pre-installed with Windows Vista, which was "upgraded" to XP several weeks later by me, which I consider is much better for my current needs, where I need raw power (for games and later video decoding/encoding needed for my university's final project).

Enough intro! Let's get down to business. After installing Ubuntu to this laptop, everything worked out of the box (including video acceleration of the desktop, so I was amused by Compiz-fusion:), except Broadcom wireless drivers were missing and also my laptop speaker weren't muted when I insert headphones.

The solution for wireless

For this to work, I use ndiswrapper, which is in Ubuntu's main repository. Just:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper ndiswrapper-utils

The actual drivers are from Windows system, I have attached them for convenience wifi.tar.bz2. Download them and extract to temporary place, we will need only the INF file:

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Our wireless driver is now installed but not working just yet. It's currently being blocked by another driver that is trying to run, so we need to block this other driver:

sudo sh -c  'echo "blacklist bcm43xx" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist'

Now let's add it to the modules list.

sudo sh -c echo 'ndiswrapper' >> /etc/modules

I don't remmenber if loading ndiswrapper module manually will work flawlessly, I guess it would. But after restart your wireless should be working and the light will be glowing blue. Congratulations, you wireless card is now working!

The solution for headphones

I've read, that using alsa 1.0.15 has fixed this problem, but I don't want to upgrade my current stable system to a development branch, so I've stuck with 1.0.14. The solution is quite easy, we just need to manualy set the correct value of our sound device:

sudo sh -c echo 'options snd-hda-intel model=laptop' >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Now, connect you headphones and listen to Apparat!