Wireless Setup: Part 1

After the update, everything seems to be working fine so far. The next immediate hurdle is to get wireless working. I have a Netgear WG511 (version 2) PCMCIA card. It did not "just work" in Ubuntu. To get it working, the first step is to see if Ubuntu recognizes the card.

lspci

This command lists a bunch of devices, including the wireless card, but instead of "Netgear WG511v2" or anything like that is lists

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 (Libertas) 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

This is actually the chipset used in the card. Searching the web I found this page that describes how to install the proper driver. Basically, a native linux driver doesn't exist, but a program called "NDIS wrapper" exists that can interpret regular Windows drivers for linux systems. The webpage says to use ndiswrapper 1.8 and the Windows 2000 drivers. I used the Ubuntu Synaptic package manager to install ndiswrapper. Then I put in the Netgear CD that came with the card and (using the terminal) navigated to the directory containing the Windows 2000 driver. Within that directory there were three files: TRANS.TBL, WG511v2.INF, and WG511v2.sys .

sudo ndiswrapper -i WG511v2.INF

checking the install using

ndiswrapper -l

displays

Installed drivers:
wg511v2 driver installed, hardware present

Then we have to load the driver into the operating system

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

And now the green light on the wireless card blinks, but not the yellow light. To install the driver automatically each time the laptop is started up,

sudo ndiswrapper -m

My laptop now recognizes the card as a potential internet connection called "wlan0". It shows up as a wireless device in iwconfig. I can detect wireless access ports by

iwlist wlan0 scan