Comment 41 for bug 231455

@CalcProgrammer:

Thanks for all of your help. I have a system than I can use with the open office application that will boot up in only a couple of minutes.

I can use Ubunto , but I will not be able to connect to anything via a wireless connection.

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@The Ubuntu Marketing effort and those wanting to promote the use of Ubuntu.

I used to install Unix on NCR Tower 32's and Xenix on intel 286 machines over 25 years ago and never did it take more than 3 or 4 hours to get everything working. I had intel 286 machines supporting up to 8 vt100/vt220 type terminals. Admittedly, we used to pay around $2,000 per operating system for each machine.

The past week has been very frustrating and if operating systems like Ubuntu want to make any real progress, then they need to work much harder to ensure new users are not faced with so many roadbloacks. But I said that back when Microsoft was a baby and the Unix community then were oblivious to the competition and any concept of user friendly interfaces. Unfortunately not much has changed.

After downloading ndiswrapper, finding out how to set the root password (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=954209&highlight=root+password), how to use tar to unzip ndiswrapper-1.53.tar.gz, and then following the instructions on what looked like a very promising wiki entry (http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/NDIS_Wrapper), I finally succumbed when the make command yielded a number of errors which prevented any further progress.

The inability to support many of the existing wireless network cards out there will obviously have an impact on the take up of operating systems like Ubuntu. There is a huge market out there for an operating system and applications that can make use of old computer hardware that no longer has sufficient horsepower to run modern day windows systems.

I am not going to purchase a new network card that has linux drivers as the cost of new system with windows vista will give me everything I want with up to date processors and applications. The market for Ubuntu is not really low cost, it is no cost. The time I have spent trying to get Ubuntu working would have paid for a new computer system.