Thu, 14 Jul 2005

Wireless Networking in Ubuntu

Thanks to [ILUG Mailing list person] for pointing me in the direction of some helpful Ubuntu Forum, solving my wireless problem under Ubuntu. Installing and configuring a Belkin 54g card (F5D7010) under Ubuntu is really quite simple, once you find out that the generated config file will never turn the card on (until you edit it, that is) :-)

Install Ubuntu and get some networking going (the wired ethernet port on this laptop worked out of the box - Broadcom Tigon3 chipset)
Install the ndiswrapper-utils: apt-get update; apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
Install the Windows driver for the wireless card: ndiswrapper -i /mnt/cdrom0/Driver/bcmwl5.inf
Check that the driver and hardware are installed and detected okay: ndiswrapper -l
Don't modprobe the driver yet... under Ubuntu (or due to the version of ndiswrapper with Ubuntu - I don't know) the config file for the card itself gets generated with RadioState set to 1, which means that the card never gets powered up. Using your favourite editor (vim) edit the config file for your card and change the line to read "RadioState|0" My config file is called /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5/14E4:4320:1799:7010.conf, line 30 of which is the RadioState line.
Start the ndiswrapper module: modprobe ndiswrapper
Configure your wireless network as appropriate. Ubuntu has some good tools for this, but I did it manually in my previous post
That's it

Thanks to all those who helped and provided suggestions as to what might be at fault or misconfigured.
posted at: 01:45 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry