I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix release candidate on my new Dell Mini 10v and the wireless didn’t work out of the box. I think this is because there isn’t an open source driver and Ubuntu doesn’t ship with proprietary drivers installed. Now the 9.10 has been released this problem may have disappeared, but in case anyone else sees this, the way to solve it is to install the proprietary wireless driver (Broadcom STA) yourself.
This is pretty easy using the Ubuntu restricted drivers tools: Ubuntu Menu -> System -> Hardware Drivers (in the 2nd box of applications). Note that you’ll need an Internet connection to actually install this so hopefully you can make use of a wired connection temporarily! When I initially installed this driver there were actually two to choose from but it was the Broadcom STA driver that worked. Now I only see a single option available.
The API for the indicator applet has changed in Karmic and a little internal IBM Python application that I’ve written stopped working. Only a couple of minor changes were needed but trying to track down exactly what these were was not as easy a task as I’d have liked.
Creating the indicator
The class used to represent an indicator appears to have changed from IndicatorMessage to Indicator so I threw in the following code to try the new one and fallback to the old one:
try:
# Ubuntu 9.10 and above
indicator = indicate.Indicator()
except:
# Ubuntu 9.04
indicator = indicate.IndicatorMessage()
Drawing attention
Previously, indicators automatically made the indicator applet draw your attention with a green dot. In Karmic the green dot appears to have been replaced with a change of the envelope colour to black but it is no longer automatic. To make this work you need to set the draw-attention property:
indicator.set_property('draw-attention', 'true');
Note that they’ve also added a count property to display how many notifications are from the same source.
