A few months ago I installed Ubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron) on my Compaq Presario V2000 laptop. The install went pretty well, except that wifi didn’t work. It turned out that my laptop had a Broadcom BCM4318 wifi card which has a proprietary driver. So it required some extra steps to get going. I scanned the internet for a bit and found that it ended up being pretty simple. Note that I had ethernet connected so I would have access to the internet.
apt-get install b43-fwcutter
After installing I gave it a reboot (probably not strictly necessary but Windows has conditioned me this way) and my wifi LED lit up! A bit of setup to connect to my router and I was back on wireless!
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to get everything set up that my wife would need (mostly an iTunes replacement and streaming video in firefox) so I ended up putting WInXP back on. I didn’t see enough of a performance improvement to justify the time it would take. Maybe later though… If so I will put a more full install guide on here.
Tardis for a Toolbox 
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