Ubuntu 6.06 and WPA

Last week after recieving the Ubuntu cds from Canonical as usual, I installed Dapper on my Asus A2 laptop. Installation went fine, except for the same old problem with my SMC 2835 wireless pcmcia card. Once again I had to go through all that process of getting my wireless connection working, but this time I took an alternative road.

– First of all install Automatix, this script will install the NDISWrapper and Gnome NetworkManager packages need to simplify the process.

– If you do a ifconfig you’ll probably see your wireless card listed as eth2, this will change later to wlan0.

– Make sure you have the NDISWrapper installed doing ndiswrapper on a terminal window. If you get a “command not found” error then something went wrong with Automatix, make sure you check the wreless networking packages. If you get an error response from the NDISWrapper that’s fine, it means you have it installed.

– This is one of the most important steps. Ubuntu loads the Prism54 kernel module, but this conflicts with the NDISWrapper, so you’ll have to sudo rmmod prism54 and then sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add the line blacklist prism54 to the file and save.

– Reboot.

– Now, download the SMC 2835 Windows XP drivers, unpack and install with Windows Wireless Drivers (System > Administration > Windows Wireless Drivers and then Install New Driver).

– By now your Wireless NIC should be listed as Wlan0 on ifconfig.

– You should have the Gnome NetworkManager applet on the Gnome panel near the clock, click it and choose “Connect to Other Wireless Network” and you’ll see WEP and WPA options. Just enter your Wireless Network SSID and password and you’re done.

You can probably adapt this mini tutorial to another wireless nic so let me know if this works with you.

[tags]Linux, Ubuntu, Dapper, Wireless, SMC, SMC 2835, NDISWrapper, Automatix, Gnome[/tags]

User Input

  • AtV says:

    Hi there,

    i habe a problem with the topic
    …”unpack and install with Windows Wireless Drivers (System > Administration > Windows Wireless Drivers and then Install New Driver).”

    I am a novice, but does it make sense to install windows drivers at ubuntu-linux?

    When it does, how ?

    Thx
    AtV

  • Odrakir says:

    At this time, WPA support on Linux is very limited for some hardware. I came across this solution because it was the only way to get my SMC card to work the way I needed. That’s the only sense this makes. 😉 Once the Prism54 Kernel module supports WPA I’ll be very happy to uninstall the windows drivers from my Linux.