Mike Blamires

Having not go into this new fangled web 2.0 stuff that seems to have been invented by the tech press, I thought I would start a fresh and make a real attempt at this blogging lark.

There are some great blogs out there, and there are many many poor efforts void of content and frequent updating. I fitted in to the latter of the two. I am here to make amends.

I have upgraded - rejiged and am striving for more general geekery, less spam and possibly even some readers ... lets see what happens.

Connecting to the network you have viewed with "iwlist scan" - the simple part you say?

It should just be a quick case of firing up wlassistant and bobs your uncle there is the network, enter your key choose DHCP address and start surfing... well not for me.

I can see the network but any attempt to connect pitifully boots me out.

Anyway figuring it was something to do with authentication. I found the following HOWTO sorted that bit and this afternoon I swang by my folks and tried that one out aswell (which worked).

Here is the howto: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=263136

Here are the commands in a nutshell.

wpa_passphrase your_ssid your_psk
sudo gedit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

copy the following in here and on the line marked "psk=" copy the string after psk= from the output of your first line

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
#ap_scan=2

network={
ssid="mywlan"
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
psk=[generated by your first command]
}

edit the following into you network interfaces file and add in the additional lines following # to your wlan0 description

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
#pre-up wpa_supplicant -Bw -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

then run


pre-up wpa_supplicant -Bw -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

like it would be at boot from your interfaces file. You should now be able to connect without issue...

posted wirelessly!

It's been a while since I started looking at this one and it's finally happened.

I now have the Wg111t USB wireless usb key working in Ubuntu, since I started the big problem I have had is that after installing with ndiswrapper the Wlan0 alias doesn't appear, restarting the network ( sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart ) shows that the hardware for Wlan0 is not present.

I have an 'old' laptop that I predominately use at the moment and as it isn't exactly new I am trying to keep running only stable packages.
It is worth noting that when using ndiswrapper-1.34 as soon as the module was loaded and the hardware was present (either loaded at start up or when hotplugged in) the whole system hung. Error about unauthorised hardware access appeared and the caps lock on the keyboard flashed leaving me with no choice but to hard reboot the laptop.

Anyway to cut a long story short the version of ndiswrapper that sprung into action for me is ndiswrapper-1.35rc1.

Before you compile ndiswrapper make sure you have the linux-header files, do this with sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`.

The following commands did the trick:

sudo modprobe -r ndiswrapper
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils
tar -xzf ndiswrapper-1.35rc1.tar.gz
cd ndiswrapper-1.35
make
sudo make
sudo make install
cd
sudo ndiswrapper -i athfmwdl.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -i netwg11t.inf

At this point running "ndiswrapper -l" showed:


athfmwdl : driver installed
netwg11t : driver installed
device (1385:4250) present

then install the driver as a module.

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

running ifconfig shows the following:


lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate=108 Mb/s
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Finally. A couple of gotchas are:

- make sure you uninstall the ndiswrapper module before installing the module of ndiswrapper.
- install the correct kernel headers before compiling ndiswrapper
- oh and I haven't checked it works on my wireless network yet, it's 2am what more do you want from me?!?

Some links for reference:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ndiswrapper/+bug/66697
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List#N