How to fix the wifi on a HP Mini 110 Netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Installing Karmic Koala from a USB drive proved to be a bit less than effortless. First off the http and ftp servers for the netbook-reloaded ISO images were really slow, and for some odd reason there aren’t any bittorrent links for the netbook-reloaded image. You need to go to http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ to find the .torrent link (which is here).

The installation instructions need some editing, too, but the jist is if you’ve got a linux box, use usb-creator — and don’t panic when the usb-creator main window disappears (and doesn’t get replaced with a progress window for several minutes).

So the main glitch was wireless — it didn’t work out of the box on my HP 110 netbook.

There’s instructions to install some random linux source package, but that’s a red herring — just go find a wired network connection, run

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

which will then prompt for a reboot. Wait for the reboot (it’s fast! just a couple seconds to a working X!), then go to System > Hardware Drivers, and it’ll find the drivers you need automatically. Click them to enable, wait for them to install, reboot, and wireless should work.

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