As requested, here is a little more detail on the laptop:
First off, for anyone confused by the last post, the laptop works beautifully out of the box running windows. I personally hate windows Vista, and wanted to try a different operating system. I chose Ubuntu Linux. That had some problems working with its basic install, problems I believe I have fully solved.
The wireless card is fully functional (as far as i can tell, I’m using it right now to post this). To get it to work I needed to use the latest kernel and make sure the new drivers for the rtl8187 wireless driver were installed. This is the driver for the wireless network adapter on this system. Medion used a USB ethernet adapter in the laptop design, rather than the standard pci type cards. This is why the card does not show in lspci.
For more detailed instructions on compiling the new kernel follow the instructions here:
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_ubuntu
One thing they left out in those directions, that I am not sure is really all that important with this laptop, was to copy the firmware files to to new directory for this kernel. You name may vary, depending on how you compiled the kernel, mine is 2.6.23-custom As root:
mkdir /lib/firmware/2.6.23-custom
cp -R /lib/firmware/2.6.22-14-generic/* /lib/firmware/2.6.23-custom/
You must use at least kernel 2.6.23 to get the correct drivers. And you must make sure to go in and select the driver to get it to compile. Once the new kernel is complied and installed, download the new version of ALSA (1.0.15) and compile and install it.
After rebooting you should have wireless, and sound. So far I have not noticed anything else that doesn’t work that I can’t live with. Graphics performance is pretty slow,but it is using generic graphics drivers, I suppose I could download the nvidia drivers and install them if I was really interested.
John's Musings 