wlan in linux- o dear

[khizman]

ok i installed ubuntu linux, now how on earth do i get my wlan working on it?
http://www.linksys.com/products/prod...id=36&prid=435
thats what i have

[Norky]

http://www.chickenandporn.com/WUSB11-howto.html

Most promising result Google threw up, although there are hundreds of guides under 'Linkssy WUSB11 linux'

[directhex]

people seem under the mistaken impression that writing drivers is easy.

take any piece of hardware. it has metal pins on it. in order to make the device work, you need to know what pins to zap with electricity, when, and why - and what the end result is. this is commonly referred to as register information, and is the very bare minimum needed to write a driver

beyond that, it also helps to have someone with some knowledge of the hardware device in question, such as a member of staff for the company in question, contribute to the driver. for example, have an intel employee work on drivers for intel stuff.

now shift focus to wireless land, a strange land where the laws of logic don't apply. products are released, with the same model number, but three different chipsets from competing companies. companies not only say "no" to releasing register information, but actively work against people trying to make their products work outside of the usual Windows XP environment.

whilst someone like silicon image believes open-source support for their products is beneficial, broadcom are even more windows-only than microsoft themselves.

so, to your example. versions 2.1, 2.6 and 2.8 of your adapter are based on an Amtel chipset. version 2.5 is Prism2-based. Prism cards are well supported out of the box on modern Linux kernels, with the orrinoco driver. Amtel is only supported by a third party driver, with a choice of several (http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/ or http://at76c503a.berlios.de/ for example)

you can find out what hardware you have with "lsusb" in a console (you may need to install it with "apt-get install usbutils").

if you're annoyed at the complexity, complain to your hardware vendor, and demand more positive action on open-source support

[Norky]

Excellent post

I have been fortunate to have moderate success using ndiswrapper, but WiFi support in Linux is desperately sketchy.

[directhex]

Excellent post

I have been fortunate to have moderate success using ndiswrapper, but WiFi support in Linux is desperately sketchy.

generally, speak to your hardware manufacturer

it's relatively common for there to be open-source drivers, but which are not in a stable enough state to be included in the mainline linux kernel - amtel and ralink are examples of this. broadcom are the main anti-linux flag bearers, and intel's centrino wireless policies are highly restrictive (you need a firmware file from intel.com to use it, it's not licensed to be downloaded by the end-user as standard, so can't be included in a Free distro)

[khizman]

direct hex - added u to msn
i have followed a guide
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...4&page=2&pp=10 post no 12
and i get up to the last stage and it says
command not found
makefile error 127

[smtkr]

now shift focus to wireless land, a strange land where the laws of logic don't apply. products are released, with the same model number, but three different chipsets from competing companies. companies not only say "no" to releasing register information, but actively work against people trying to make their products work outside of the usual Windows XP environment.

I hear you on this one. I have a broadcom 802.11g card that is dead weight in my laptop right now. I'm told that there exists a wrapper that allows the use of windows drivers, but I haven't tried it yet (http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/). I'm thinking about experimenting with it this summer when I have some free time. It would be nice to give Broadcom the big fook you and run bcomm hardware in linux.

Anyhow, if anyone else is brave enough to try this out, be sure to post about it.

Cheers.

[directhex]

I hear you on this one. I have a broadcom 802.11g card that is dead weight in my laptop right now. I'm told that there exists a wrapper that allows the use of windows drivers, but I haven't tried it yet (http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/). I'm thinking about experimenting with it this summer when I have some free time. It would be nice to give Broadcom the big fook you and run bcomm hardware in linux.

Anyhow, if anyone else is brave enough to try this out, be sure to post about it.

Cheers.

ndiswrapper is a free equivalent. on debian, apt-get install module-assistant && module-assistant auto-install ndiswrapper

still relies on windows drivers and is still unstable, though

that said, it's not giving them any kind of "screw you" message. the message they see is "look, you don't even need to develop any linux drivers, it all works great on i386 on correct kernel versions via ndiswrapper" - which decreases not increases the chance of them making linux drivers