Once I was comfortable with the Ubuntu desktop installation and found out that there is a server edition for Ubuntu, I started working towards setting up the Ubuntu server. With the risk of repeating myself, I say that Ubuntu is truly a user friendly distribution. And once you get yourself familiarised with the environment customising the installation should be pretty much easy for an administrator.

In about 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation. This is possible because Ubuntu has packaged the server installation also. It gives the user option to install a plain vanilla version or the fully loaded LAMP version depending on requriements saving the user from making decisions to select which component to install and which to pass.

Once you select which version is right for you, the installation process starts. The installation process is a classic text based which walks you through the entire process with ease. Of course you can customise whatever options you want, like disk space, partitions, locales and time zones, first user and password etc.

I was not entirely correct in my earlier article where I said that the Broadcom drivers for wireless interfaces are not there for Ubuntu. Although I was right in saying that Broadcom has not released the specifications for the drivers, Linux community has developed drivers for Broadcom wireless interfaces by reverse engineering. The project site is hosted at http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/. It has some excellent resources on configuring the BCM wireless cards and making it work. More of that later.

So the Ubuntu Server identified all of my hardware correctly including the wireless network card. However, as I later found out, it could not configure it completely. The rest of the installation was breeze and it really did finish in about 15 minutes and it told me to remove the media before rebooting. However, once I removed the media and rebooted the server refused to boot up. It started alright, but it always stuck at:

Uncompressing Linux... OK. Booting the kernel.

I tried a couple of time and then tried re-installing the OS from scratch. Still nothing. The boot process stopped at the same place. I thought maybe it needs some time to load everything for the first time and waited for 15 minutes. Still nothing. At this time I am not sure, if there is some error with the installation, my hardware or the CD itself. It gives me a console prompt, if I choose to go to the boot menu and select the bash prompt.

I, not being a Linux / Unix guru, could really make head way into that and I reverted back to Ubuntu Desktop.

Back on the desktop: On the Ubuntu desktop, I then started working on why the network card was not working. I looked around on the internet and found out that BCM43xx is natively supported in Ubuntu 6.06. I did not want to use NDISWrapper and hence I started work on getting the card working as described on the project website documentation. After spending around 2 hours, I finally got the interface working. Previously for the command:

iwlist eth1 scan

Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.3

Copyright 2004-2005 Internet Systems Consortium.

All rights reserved.



Listening on LPF/eth1/00:04:75:9a:3d:51

Sending on   LPF/eth1/00:04:75:9a:3d:51

Sending on   Socket/fallback

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 1

No DHCPOFFERS received.

No working leases in persistent - Sleeping.

I tried giving the IP address manually in the valid range, but the wireless network card just refuses to come on the network. My internet works perfectly fine with wired connection. What is going on here? Any pointers?