by robspop » Sun Jun 13, 2010 6:24 am
Hi
Thanks again for continuing suggestions. However, the problem is more fundamental than assigning a driver to the wifi device, whether it's a linux driver, a windows driver, or whatever.
The O/S simply cannot "see" the card at all. It is not a device without a driver: the device doesn't exist.
I think you can see from the boot messages I posted originally that when the EISA bus is probed, no resources are allocated to any of the expansion slots. That means that, after that, no expansion cards are detected. This is a desktop PC, not a laptop, and the wifi is an add-on card, not integrated into the motherboard. There are no other add-on cards but I have no doubt they would not be recognised either.
It seems to me this is some sort of motherboard problem: the expansion ports are not correctly handled so nothing plugged into them is handled at all.
I used to have Mint 8 on this machine, which is an Ubuntu 9 derivative, and it worked "out of the box". I just tried Mint 9 which, like UE2.7, is an Ubuntu 10 derivative, and it doesn't work either. Something that was present in U9 appears to be missing, or not automatically loaded, in U10.
Maybe so many people use laptops nowadays that nobody has noticed this, since they don't have expansion ports, and the PC I'm using must be about 3 years old. Still, there must be a huge number of them still out there, so it seems hard to believe nobody else will be using one.
I'll scout around and see if anyone else has come across this issue elsewhere in the Ubuntu world; in the meantime, I'd be grateful for any further suggestions!
Paul