Problems with Wifi Card

>02:04.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2915ABG [Calexico2] Network Connection (rev 05)

This is the wireless, will not work.

>10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 11)

This is the ethernet, no idea if this works.

In order for a system to be completely free there must be no proprietary software on it. Since the project is committed to Free Software you will find no such driver in the repos. My suggestion would be to get a USB device to use with the computer.

Trisquel is designed to be free of proprietary software. This has its advantages and disadvantages. Its disadvantage is that it is harder to try it out for the first time if your coming from an environment that is hostile to users freedom. At least if you haven't learned to be weary of proprietary software already.

The advantage though is once you start using free software and only free software nobody can take away your right to use it with whatever OS and version of the OS you want. What happens in Ubuntu and on other distributions which include proprietary software (and proprietary operating systems like MS Windows and Mac OS X) is that the manufacturers discontinue support for newer versions. Since your dependant on them for updated software your hardware no longer works. This is what many manufacturers do to force you to buy new hardware.

Now when users are concerned about there freedom they can (often) avoid these pitfalls by avoiding the hardware which is dependent on non-free software.

This is what happened in your case. Intel does not support free software. They release only part of the code needed for it to work on a completely free operating system. As a result it doesn't work on Trisquel. Users will never be able to get bug fixes or updates unless Intel provides them.

So with Trisquel you know up front if hardware is good or bad. If it doesn't work it's bad.

The solution is to be weary of your hardware purchases from the start.

In this case your best bet is to purchase a replacement card if your system doesn't have digital restrictions that prevent it and your technically capable of replacing it or don't mind hiring someone else to do so.

The other option is to purchase a USB wireless adapter. This will work even if your system is infected with digital restrictions.

The main thing you need to know is that your computer has something called a chipset. In fact you have many chipsets. Your wifi card contains a bad chipset.

There is one company designing wireless pcie chipsets that are good. This company is Atheros. There are a number of different 802.11g and n chipsets from Atheros and most will work. Some are better than others though.

There are also wireless USB chipsets. There are only a handful of USB wireless chipsets which are good. The RTL8187, RTL8187B, and RTL8187L are USB G wireless chipsets. These are the best for most non-technical users right now. They will just work. There is also AR9170 which is a USB N draft chipset. It's not so hot. Then there is the new USB N chipset AR9271. This is great although not yet supported out of the box in Trisquel. The next release should support it.

The RTL8187 chipsets above are discontinued although you can still find adapters with them I believe. However it's not that easy because manufacturers don't stick to a single chipset for a given model. That means one person will report an adapter as working when in reality the adapter you purchase may or may not work.

I founded ThinkPenguin about 5 years ago to try and fix this issue and make it easier to get free software friendly hardware (or even get it at all in some cases). We've been working with Trisquel, the Free Software Foundation, and companies like Atheros to improve support and release free software friendly hardware targeted explicitly at GNU/Linux users.

Everything in our online store at libre.thinkpenguin.com is free software friendly and almost everything works out of the box in Trisquel 6 except for I believe the new USB N adapter (this will work in the next release).

As long as you use the URL above Trisquel gets 25% of any profits. This helps maintain Trisquel and make it better. Not to mention it promotes the development of free software friendly hardware.

If your more eager / tech savy you can try and track down other hardware with these chipsets although this is a more problematic approach and not really feasible for a lot of users.

The Free Software Foundation has a certification program that will hopefully fix this although it largely depends on the communities response and willingness to spend there money where it counts.

You can read more about it here:

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom

Non-free software though is not just negatively impacting users where there hardware is concerned. It also comes with a cost elsewhere. There have been thousands of programs over the last 20 years which have been discontinued or abandoned on GNU/Linux (not to mention non-free programs on non-free operating systems). If you were dependant on any one of them your now in a very bad situation (potentially). Examples: Oracle's non-free version of Java, Adobe's decision to drop its proprietary Flash plug-in, and many others. Users are now unable to surf many Java and Flash dependent sites unless there technically savy enough to work around the problem. This is not an easy thing for a large percentage of GNU/Linux users. It's something that should never have happened. Unfortunately our community is learning the hard way and much of it is in denial still. If your unable to stick with Trisquel I'd encourage you to continue being weary of non-free software and avoid it wherever you can.