Mike Blamires

Link: http://www.msmm.org.uk/

No geekery in this article but I did want a link for Midsummer Music Madness & Hunsley Acoustic music on here sooooo http://www.msmm.org.uk.

Some pictures of the last excellent event can be found here http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/MikeBlamires/MidsummerMusicMadness.

Enjoy!

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