Wireless with Linksys WMP54GS card on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04)

Since I got a new PC running a dual boot XP/Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) I moved the old one to my room for my girl friend to use. Therfor, I need to get it a wireless connection by installing her soon-to-go-to-trash old pc's current card: a linksys WMP64GS.

Out-of-the-box support

I first took a shot with the very naive approch: I installed the card in the box and booted the existing install of ubuntu without touching anything.

Clearly, the card has been detected. I now have a 'wireless' connection displayed in the applet network manager.
I tried several times to connect to my wireles network. I don't get any error but it doesn't look like there is any signal.

So I did what any good Internet user would do in such circonstances: I googled.

I found out (in various places, forums and wikis) that WMP54GS wasn't supported out-of-the-box (what a surprise !) and that there were two ways to get it to work:

• use NDISWRAPPER package to use Windows drivers
• use the native drivers in the kernel

NDISWRAPPER

I first tried the first approach following precisly the instructions in this post (what a thread title!).
At the end of the process, it didn't seem it had any effect at all. I just found out that the GUI NDISGTK for NDISWRAPPER was buggy (I added the driver but it didn't show up in the list).
Now that I think about it, I should probably have rebooted the network interface but I didn't know how to do it at the time.

Therefore, I used the command line to remove the installed driver from NDISWRAPPER (since I couldn't select it in the GUI, I couldn't remove it).
To list the installed drivers:

sudo ndiswrapper -l

To remove a driver (the driver name I had from the previous command was "bcmwl5"):

sudo ndiswrapper -r bcmwl5

I then removed the NDISGTK package via synaptic and went on trying the other approach.

Native drivers

Installation of the native drivers for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) can be found on this wiki page (wiki pages for other versions of Ubuntu are linked at the bottom of the page)

I had good hopes this would be it because I had noticed the error messages at startup they describe in the introduction.

I followed the instructions they provide for installation. I will put them here though in case the page disappeares and because I have a few comments.

step 1: Obtaining the Firmware

install the bcm43xx-fwcutter package.

sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter

It will ask if you want it to download and extract the firmware, but because the link is currently broken, choose no.
Then enter the following to download the recommended driver manually.

wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o

Now extract the firmware.

sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware  wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o

step 2: Loading module and checking card

Load the module:

sudo modprobe bcm43xx

The device gets loaded as either eth1/eth2. Find out which one it is by doing a

iwconfig

This should return the name of the interface as ethX. Check if you can scan for networks using

sudo iwlist ethX scan

This command returned that scanning was disabled or not possible on my card. So I decided to unmount and remount the card

sudo idown eth1
sudo ifup eth1

I then tried the scan command once again and then I got a big listing. I checked my wireless network was actualy in the list and then moved on the step 3.

step 3: Connecting to wireless network

The wiki page give instruction on how to setup a WPA connection with some config file. I decided I would try he GUI before getting to that.

So I clicked on the network manager applet and selected "connect to a wireless network" and entered my network details: ESSID, cypher type (I'm using WPA2 personnal) and passphrase. It just worked !

Note: before trying either approach I got the latest Linux kernel version installed (2.6.20) through package update.