I have been using Ubuntu linux for about a month now, and I am still pretty much a rookie in the world of Linux (obviously). But already have I learned an important point – use linux on well-supported hardware!

I bought my Dell D620 with a Dell wireless card – this have shown to be very stupid because the wireless card is based on a Broadcom chipset for which no official linux driver exists. I have two options to get the wireless in my notebook to work:

• Use a reverse-engineered driver from http://bcm43xx.berlios.de – this driver seems to work pretty good, though the range and speed of the wireless card is very low when using this driver. Because of this, I do not want to use that driver
• Use NDISWrapper and a native windows driver in cooperation. I used that solution a couple of weeks until my laptop became very unstable (in that time I often lost my connection) – until then I could do with that solution, but because of the instability I do not want to use this solution.

This is the reason why I shall order a new and well supported wireless chip from Dell using a Intel chipset. If you want a Dell D620, please buy it with the Intel wireless card – it saves you a lot of trouble (especially if you want to run linux at some point).

Just a sidenote: I recently discovered that the instability when using the NDISWrapper and native windows driver solution was caused by a driver (IRQ) conflict with the NVIDIA Quadro 110M graphics card.