I’ve been doing something that I should have been doing a long time ago. As I haven’t been using my desktop much since my last hard disk crash, it has sported only a Windows XP install. Yesterday I set down to install Ubuntu on it; completing another backup, clearing space and getting the actual iso image written to a CD. Everything went a-OK up to and including the install.
Now, getting on teh intrawebz was a bit harder. After setting the wireless up nicely in the graphical network manager and then turning it on a few times, I suddenly noticed that there was no wireless card installed. Which kind of explained why I didn’t connect to my router. Selecting troubleshooting from the Help prompted me to install ndisgtk
from the Synaptic Package Manager. Where I couldn’t find it. Which was fixed by inserting the Ubuntu CD again, and adding it to the package repositories from within the package manager.
Now the troubles began. I was prompted to install a Windows driver ( a *.inf
file ) for the card. Checking up what was installed in Windows I found an oem driver – which didn’t work under Ubuntu, probably because it was filled with different values and references to packaged files residing elsewhere and on Windows CD’s. Next I went to the manufacturer’s webpage and downloaded what turned out to be the wrong driver. Which installed, but didn’t find the hardware. Now I dug into Howto documents and man pages. They pointed me in direction of the NDISwrapper compatibility list. Which doesn’t exist any more, and when I dug up a more or less recent version on archive.org it didn’t contain my card.
The fix was easy. I just had to get the correct driver from the manufacturer – or rather from the people who branded the hardware. My card is a Jensen Wireless High Speed USB
dongle. Running lsusb
yielded:
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1435:0210 Wistron NeWeb
for my card. This card can be used through ndiswrapper with the driver downloadable from Jensen Scandinavia.
