Wireless

My first goal was to tackle the wireless NIC. I'll need this at work on Monday, but I can live without sound for a while. With FC2 I had been using LinuxAnt's DriverLoader module (wrapper for the stock WinXP drivers). I tried this first, with the same setup as I had used with FC2. The wrapper seeemed to work and Ubuntu's wireless panel icon lit up, indicating that the system was aware of the card. I couldn't ever get connected to my access point, though. I decided to try ndiswrapper instead.

Ndis Project Page

I simply downloaded the .deb file (download file), installed it (sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-source_1.0-1_i386.deb), and followed the Debian install instructions and the general installation instructions. The most important parts were the post-install configurations. Here are the commands I ran:

sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-source_1.0-1_i386.deb cd /usr/src/ sudo tar -xzf ndiswrapper-source.tar.gz cd modules/ndiswrapper/ sudo fakeroot debian/rules binary sudo dpkg -i ../ndiswrapper*.deb cd {path to windows driver} sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf sudo modprobe ndiswrapper sudo iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed sudo iwconfig wlan0 key restricted s:{password} sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid {ap-name} sudo ndiswrapper -m

This last command is supposed to make the ndiswrapper module load automatically or something. The documentation isn't very clear on that. See man ndiswrapper.

Then I created an intrface for the card using the stock Network Admin tool (sudo network-admin). OnceI created a script that does the iwconfig stuff and starts the interface for me:

#!/bin/bash modprobe ndiswrapper iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed iwconfig wlan0 essid bonanza iwconfig wlan0 key restricted s:mypassword /sbin/ifup wlan0

I put this in a file called wireless-home. I'll make another one with different settings for the network at work. For now, I enable the wireless card with

brent@laptop:~ $ sudo ./wireless-home

One important thing to notice in the script is the s: before my password. That instructs iwconfig that the password is ASCII character instead of hex. Now my wireless works!