Follow the pack

The Broadcom STA driver in the package bcmwl-kernel-source is pure evil, and almost everyone knows it. So don't waste any more time. Remove it and install firmware-b43-installer now.
The Broadcom driver was installed by default on my laptop with bcm4311 wifi card during a clean install of Ubuntu (11.10) Oneiric Ocelot, but I couldn't get it to work. Under the wifi icon enable wifi was greyed out, even though bcmwl was activated in additional drivers. Some posts on Ubuntu forums and ask Ubuntu said that the driver had a bug in 11.10. Searching the internet, it gradually became apparent that b43 firmware from Linux wireless is preferred to bcmwl. I removed it from the software center, and it also removed a package called dkms. Then I installed b43 from the software center (but I have used apt-get on my other box to install b43legacy) and rebooted. Viola, wifi.
See http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Supported_devices (current) & https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx (slightly outdated) for more info.

Sharing files

Sharing files should be a piece of cake?  Right click, select sharing, enable, done.

Well almost. First off, samba is not installed by default with my distro (Ubuntu 11.10), but Ubuntu kindly offers to install samba the first time you click file sharing. And if you are the only user on the box, then that's it. Piece of cake.Hooray!

However, if you have another user, then you enter into the murky CLI territory for which Linux is so famous. But in this case the command is easy. All you have to do is add the user to the sambashare group using the usermod command. As always read the man pages completely before trying any hack (man usermod, man sudo), then hit ctrl-alt-T and presto, a terminal window will appear. Then enter the following command, if you dare.

$ sudo usermod -a -G sambashare

I've used the sudo command many times blindly following the directions posted online, without really appreciating how powerful this command is. Even more power is the su command (man su) which can seriously mess up your system if you're like me and don't know what you're doing. In this case sudo just says run the following commands as root, and prompts you for your password before running the command. Therefore you must be logged in as an administrator for this to work. Then the usermod command modifies the user. In this case I used the -a option with the -G option to append the user to a supplementary group. I don't wan't the user to be removed from it's current groups so that's why I have to use the -a option. If I only used the -G option, the user would be removed from any group it was currently a member of that was not listed following the -G option. I know, tricky, right?

When I first tried to share the public folder in the other users home I get a warning message, that I do not own the file and so I can't share it. But if I wanted I could edit the global smb.conf file to force sharing even if I don't own it. Really, that's way too much work. Logging in as the other user, who is not an administrator, gave me another clue about what to do. It says can't enable file sharing because the user was not a member of the sambashare group. Ubuntu actually said to ask the administrator to add me to the group. Then of course, as you are doing now, I went to the internet, and tried to find out how to do this. But first I managed to totally mess up my system by running su without the -c option for commands. How I have managed to not totally brick my Android is beyond me. Luckily there is a file system checker that fixed my errors. Again friendly Ubuntu tells you what to do, but I'll save that for another post.

Not quite like snowboarding

Linux seems like something you know, kind like Unix, kind of like windows or mac, but no it's new territory, with a very steep and treacherous learning curve; I've already broken my 1st box 3 times
But it's addictive, although not as outdoorsy as snowboarding, I'm really hoping I'll catch on fast. This series will be dedicated to my blunders, because how else do you learn.