reed9

Well, actually, since it was working, there was no longer a clear reason to upgrade.

To give a brief context, a given release of a distribution will not usually do more than apply security patches or minor version upgrades to the software that makes up the distro. The whole software ecosystem of a distribution is a pretty tangled web, and there are a variety of reasons why they do not do major software upgrades for a given release.

However, for some software, a distro might backport packages. Porting is adapting software to run in an environment it was not originally built for, or generally changing software so that it works in different environments. So you might port a linux program to windows, or in this case, port software built for the next Ubuntu release back to the current one.

The linux-backports-modules packages contains newer drivers for a variety of things, including wireless. Specifically it includes some version of compat-wireless, which might include new drivers or bug fixes or what not.

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smokeyone

Thank you for the help again and thanks for the explaination - I know what
porting means now as well and some of the other phrases. I was really stuck with the wireless problem and did not find any mention on various forums the easy to follow kind of help you gave.

On to the next problem (dvd player) but i'll save that for the correct forum on another day.