Gateway 7405GX & Ubuntu 64?

[giantgreengoat]

I have a Gateway 7405GX and wanted to take advantage of the AMD64 proc thats in the box. I was wondering if anyone out there has attempted this and if they found that the wifi broadcom card worked? I do use a little WINE for my daughter's Jumpstart games, but they work in the 32bit realm and I think I can get them to work in the 64bit realm. My concern lies in finding and employing a 64bit driver for the broadcom, I think I'm supposed to use ndiwrapper, but the only Broadcom driver I have is the one that came with my recovery DVD from Gateway and is 32bit. Any suggestions?

prethanks!

[techieMoe]

My personal experience with 64-bit Linux has told me that it's really not worth the hassle right now. You're not going to notice any performance improvement and you're likely going to introduce all sorts of other issues (such as no 64-bit drivers for some devices and no 64-bit versions of some applications). If it works in 32-bit, stick with it.

[giantgreengoat]

I figured we're still a bit bleeding edge for it all. thx

[giantgreengoat]

Broadcom Issues:

I am pulling the Broadcom bcmwl5.inf, and attempted the bcmwl5a.inf, both from the restore disk that came with my laptop. It shows up in the network manager as inactive and activating it does nothing. My laptop requires I push Fn+F2 to enable the radio wifi, this does nothing, no light, nothing. I'm at a lost. I tried to run ndiswrapper and when I check it with -l, it says both are invalid drivers and -m shows nothing is present for eth0. I also tried the blacklist option once setting up a new link, nothing yet. Any suggestions?

[truoc444]

i'd swap the broadcom card for an atheros or prism. or as moe said try the 32 bit version of the OS

[giantgreengoat]

I'm running a 32bit distro and my card is built into the laptop. I want to avoid going out and buying something new to replace something that worked in windows, really on principle and because I'm poor.

[giantgreengoat]

Is the atheros a good card and works out the box with linux? I noticed they were cheap, within my price range.

[giantgreengoat]

Any others anyone would recommend? I need cheap and easy. heh