My Linksys WPC54G v1.2 wireless card had quickly become the bain of my Ubuntu existence. It was the last remaining peripheral I had yet to get working on Ubuntu. There are lots of tutorials and wikis on this subject and I think I’ve read them all in this process. This post is not meant to be a tutorial, I don’t understand Ubuntu enough to try and provide a technical resource, this is just to document my own experience.
So, apparently network card manufacturers don’t like providing Linux drivers. I kept reading about the ndiswrapper app. but, like most things on Sourceforge, it looked too technical for me. I’m still new to Linux and don’t really understand the command line side of Ubuntu, so I prefer GUI’s whenever possible. Plus I wasn’t sure what ndiswrapper did, let alone if it would solve my problem. Well from what I now understand, it “wraps” around the Windows driver so it’ll run on Linux.
Here’s the short explanation of how I got the wireless card working. I must add that the awesome guys on the Free Geek Columbus Ubuntu list helped me out with this today, without them I wouldn’t have found the wiki page that ultimately got me going in the right direction.
- Using this wiki page as my main resource, I uninstalled the ndiswrapper version that was included with Ubuntu.
- Downloaded the most recent ndiswrapper package (version 1.9)
- Installed the Windows driver for my wireless card by following the Read Me instructions included with ndiswrapper.
- The key here is finding the correct driver, the ndiswrapper wiki is a good source for locating the driver you need.
- I have a Linksys WPC54G v1.2 card. I thought it would be as simple as going to the Linksys website and downloading the driver for my card, but the one they provided didn’t work. Go figure. Somewhere in this process I found out my card has a Broadcom chipset so I ended up using a Broadcom driver, bcmwl5.inf.
- After installing the correct driver and loading the ndiswrapper module, the wireless connection popped up in the lower-righthand corner of my screen. Success!
I still have to figure out how to get the connection to come up by itself without having to open the Terminal and type “sudo modprobe ndiswrapper” every time I start up the laptop, but for now I’m just happy it’s working and I didn’t have to buy a new card.
Now I just need to get my wireless router from FON and I’ll be all set…
Hiyas Laura;
as root, edit the /etc/rc.local file, and have put your
modprobe ndiswrapper
as the line right above
exit 0
You don’t need the ‘sudo’ part, because the system is running these commands as root. Because the file is protected, you’ll need to edit it by doing:
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local
Hope this helps!
Ian