Solving wireless problems with ubuntu Jaunty on a iBook G4

If you installed Jaunty and and your wireless is not working as well as your wired connection is not the this guide might be for you.

First, if you type dmesg on a terminal and find something like this:

May 7 00:13:02 hormiga-blanca kernel: [ 34.116587] input: b43-phy0 as /devices/virtual/input/input9
May 7 00:13:02 hormiga-blanca kernel: [ 34.208288] b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
May 7 00:13:02 hormiga-blanca kernel: [ 34.321596] b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode5.fw" not found
May 7 00:13:02 hormiga-blanca kernel: [ 34.321607] b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the latest firmware (version 4).

Go to this page if you want to understand the whole process:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware

However, if you are lazy and just want to get your mac working as soon as possible, just follow on. So basically, all you have to do is to manually download the b43-fwcutter from the ubuntu repositories and the Firmware from the vendor site.

The Ubuntu repos for powerpc and Jaunty are here:
http://ports.ubuntu.com/pool/main/b/b43-fwcutter/
I downloaded the latests, which happened to be:
http://ports.ubuntu.com/pool/main/b/b43-fwcutter/b43-fwcutter_011-7_powerpc.deb

Then let's download the firmware from here:

http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2

Then I load the deb file and the bz2 file into a jumpdrive and plug it into the ibook.
A nautilus window will appear; double-clicking on the deb file will open the gdebi installer
and install the b43-fwcutter executable.

Next step is to decompress the bz2 file; copy it to your home folder. Right-clicking on the
file and selecting "Extract Here" will do the job (F12 popped up the contextual menu on this
keyboard, you might also want to try Shift-F10)
Open a terminal  (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), and type in:
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o
 ... various messages will appear....
sudo rmmod b43
sudo modprobe b43


Listo! Go and see on the network manager applet the list of available wireless networks.

And that's it?