Nobody was Born with Linux Knowledge

[poll id="9"] There are controversial statements concerning the compatibility of Intel WiMax 5350 Pci-Express card with HP Pavilion laptops. I haven't tested it myself yet, however if you had the chance to please drop a note! Apparently the main reason why most of the cards out there are not compatible with HP and Dell computers is due to an explicit restriction emerging from an agreement between Intel and these manufacturers to allow the installation of Centrino qualified WiFi card only. I managed to find clues about those two manufacturers, however I cannot say whether it also applies to others. It would also be interesting to figure out since when HP started putting such burden on users ability to customize their computers. Sounds like Trusted Computing / TrustedCore in action, isn't it? Most of the the cards for sale on eBay are engineering samples. Despite the hardware being exactly the same the these cards share all mostly the same MAC (machine access control) hardware address, thus cannot be used the plug&play way. Furthermore wimax certificates are likely not considered "valid" by most ISPs. From what I got to know WiMax does not use WiFi-style encrpytion, instead ISPs have a  whitelist of certificates that are paid for. There is another issue may arise: "this slot is not a fully wired minicard slot".

Many laptops that have 2 slots are actually splitting 1 physical slot into a pcie_x1 only and usb only slot, some larger laptops with 3 slots are only giving you 1 full slot and another two "half" slots. Many DELL I've run into do the latter. The fully wired slot is usually the WPAN, the WLAN is pcie_x1 only and the WWAN is usb only. Its rarely a problem because thats how nearly all wifi and broadband cards are made, the WPAN acts as a catchall for outlier configurations.

nVidia drivers 180.60 are the latest drivers that enable you to manually tweak PowerMizer state and frequency clocks. Unfortunately these drivers are not compatible with the default kernel of Ubuntu linux Karmic 9.10. In order to install them you first need to patch these drivers as detailed step by step here.Download the drivers (first command/link is always for x86 32bit OS, second one is for x86_64 64bit OS)

wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.60/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.60-pkg1.run
wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.60/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.60-pkg2.run

unpack it

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.60-pkg1.run -x
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.60-pkg2.run -x

put create an empty text file with this content

--- /usr/src/nv/nv-linux.h    2009-07-30 11:31:54.069234343 +0200
+++ /usr/src/nv/nv-linux.h    2009-07-30 11:38:44.857538204 +0200
@@ -721,7 +721,7 @@
 #define nv_up(lock)                     up(&lock)

 #if defined(CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT)
-#define NV_INIT_MUTEX(mutex) init_MUTEX(mutex)
+#define NV_INIT_MUTEX(mutex) semaphore_init(mutex)
 #else
 #if !defined(__SEMAPHORE_INITIALIZER) && defined(__COMPAT_SEMAPHORE_INITIALIZER)
 #define __SEMAPHORE_INITIALIZER __COMPAT_SEMAPHORE_INITIALIZER

save it with the name patch and place it into the extracted .run package folder (it's called NVIDIA-Linux-...) then from a terminal after having entered the folder with

 cd NVIDIA-Linux-[PRESS TAB]

patch -p1 <patch

run nvidia-installer. To do this save all the documents you are working on and close all the open programs. Then switch console with

CTRL+ALT+1

login, get root access

sudo -s

terminate gdm or kdm

service stop gdm
service stop kdm

go to the folder where you had patched the files previously (it's called NVIDIA-Linux-...) and run the installer

./nvidia-installer

follow the procedure and reboot. If you get a libgl.so.1 error do a symlink

ln -s /usr/lib /usr/lib32