All you 1337 Linux users are beginning to hate me now.

[Sylvie]

Yeah. I'm a total n00b at Linux.

Ubuntu. My wireless card. I found a site that has compatibility info on wireless cards, and mine is on it. It says it works, but it doesn't work out of the box. I'm using a Linksys WPC54G Ver. 3. The site (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...CardsSupported) says:

Couldn't get any of the windows drivers from linksys.com to work (they don't have a version 3 one listed right now) but I tried the driver off the installation cd with ndiswrapper and it worked like a charm! Just follow normal ndiswraper driver installation with the NT driver from the linksys install cd that comes with the card (built in driver works flawlessly with the 2.6.15 kernel, ndiswrapper not needed. Do not know if it will work for install.)

Now, wtf is that supposed to mean? What is ndiswrapper, and how do I use it? NT driver? How do I do all this?!!! :weep:

I'm using Ubuntu 6.06, The Dapper Drake. Once I can get this smurfing wireless card to get on the internet I'll probably update. But I need major help. I really really love Ubuntu, its great. Best thing ever. Period.
Help.

[Shoeberto]

ndiswrapper is a Linux wireless wrapper that takes Windows drivers for wifi devices and makes them run on Linux.

So all you've really go to do is install ndiswrapper, then get the Windows NT driver for your card, then point ndiswrapper at it.

I'm about positive that Ubuntu comes with ndiswrapper installed, so the extent of what you should have to do is open the command prompt and do a

ndiswrapper -i /path/to/windowsdriver.inf

From there, I'm thinking there ought to be plenty of GUI tools to walk you through locating your AP and such.

Here's a more thorough step-by-step, though I'm not sure you need to do all of it:
http://ch.tudelft.nl/~arthur/wpc54g/

[Sylvie]

Apparently ndiswrapper isn't installed on Ubuntu. (or on mine, anyway.)

Where do I get it, and how would I go about installing it?

[Shoeberto]

Synaptic would be the easiest way; I believe you can find that under System. It'll ask for your password, and then you just need to search for ndiswrapper and it should take care of the rest.

[Sylvie]

Well the problem with that is I can't get on the internet on Ubuntu, which is why I'm trying to get the wireless card working. :P

[o_O]

I've found that ndiswrapper is pretty unstable on my laptop, and that it doesn't work at all on AMD64.

On my laptop I ended up going for the Madwifi option, as my wifi card has an Atheros chipset. Your LinkSys card seems to have a Broadcom chipset, unfortunately for which there is no native Linux support.

As Hsu stated, you have the option of ndiswrapper, but that may or may not work.

The way I got my LinkSys card to work on my desktop PC was by purchasing DriverLoader from <a href="http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/">Linuxant</a>.
DriverLoader is a piece of software that, much like ndiswrapper, will load the Windows driver and provide an interface for your card. The only difference is that DriverLoader has support and works on 64bit processors.

Having said that, definitely try ndiswrapper first.

EDIT:
To set up wired networking:

• First plug computer into router via ethernet
• Then open a terminal
• Type "sudo ifconfig eth0 up" *
• Type "sudo dhclient eth0" *

* You may need to change eth0 to eth1 or eth2
And you're connected.

[Sylvie]

To set up wired networking:

• First plug computer into router via ethernet
• Then open a terminal
• Type "sudo ifconfig eth0 up" *
• Type "sudo dhclient eth0" *

* You may need to change eth0 to eth1 or eth2
And you're connected.

That will come in handy.

[Endless]

I've found that ndiswrapper is pretty unstable on my laptop, and that it doesn't work at all on AMD64.

My laptop disagrees with that statement. I have a mandriva 2007.0 on an amd64 laptop, and ndiswrapper (1-21-1mdv2007.0) works dandy.

From the <a href="http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/FAQ#Can_I_use_ndiswrapper_in_64-bit_mode_for_AMD64.3F">FAQ</a>:
Can I use ndiswrapper in 64-bit mode for AMD64?

* Support for 64-bit drivers has been added in version 1.0. Broadcom cards work well with stable release.

* Versions since 1.4-rc2 support INPROCOMM IPN2220 cards. [That's what I have, in fact]

* If your driver causes kernel oops because of reading from address 0xfffffff780000xxx, where x is any number, please report it.

[o_O]

Ah yes, I get a kernel panic on loading the driver. It seems that it is quite a common problem with Ralink chipsets.

I am possibly using an outdated version of ndiswrapper, since it sometimes takes a fairly long time for packages to make it into Portage.
Not sure which release I have at the moment, since I am not at my PC now.

I might try again with ndiswrapper tomorrow.