Coming with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy my Laptop(hp nx6325) will be free as in speech, as the OSS drivers for it made such a great progress that they can replace the closed ones.

The integrated Ati Xpress200m was running the OSS drivers on gutsy already, since the closed source fglrx prevented the hibernating and the backlit brightness to be set.
Although the OSS drivers are not as fast as the closed ones, they are enough for everyday use, but I badly miss proper EXA support.
Read more about the state of the Xpress200m here

The Broadcom wireless chipset was not usable with the bcm43xx driver in gutsy, since it lacked WPA support and had generally bad performance, but the b43 driver in hardy is much better; it supports WPA and has even decent performance. It drops more often to 1Mbit than the ndiswrapped windows driver though.
But the general usability - espaccially with network-manager 0.7 is much better now; updating the available networks is now only a matter of a few seconds.

hi there,

i have the nx6325 with the xpress200, turion64x2@2ghz and 2x1gb ram. i'm hooked on ubuntu since feisty (discovered it through WUBI). feisty was running fine, and gutsy is even better, if ati would only release the drivers... i have the fglrx running, because i like the compiz features, so no hibernation and no standby for me. i got it running on feisty, with fglrx and tux-on-ice, but i can't remember exactly how.

my question is: why do you say that the bcm43xx doesn't support wpa? i have secured my wireless with wpa2 encryption, and it works fine in several other networks. never had a serious problem with it, sometimes it's a little bit bitchy when i try to change the wireless network, and it takes forever to get an ip via dhcp, but i think both of these problems have their roots in the gnome network manager.

anyway, keep on going, it's interesting to see someone doing the same things on the same machine as i do.

I said that the bcm43xx would not support WPA, because I did not know any better
Actually I only tried to connect to my university network with it, but could never associate with the AP.

But regarding fglrx the worst thing is that you cant adjust the screen brightness with it.
Thus I use the free radeon with the patched mesa(in my PPA) for 2D & 3D - although compiz still wont work, its enough for everyday use (screensaver & tuxracer) and to get some bling I use the metacity compositor, which allows running AWN et al.

i can adjust the brightness of my backlight in the consoles (ctrl+alt+f1-6). switch over there, adjust, switch back to my desktop on f7, there you go.
it's not the easiest way, but as far as i use my laptop plugged in to ac power about 98% of the time i don't care, works for me.