Obsessed with the Press

Note that this may also apply for Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Let’s hope this get’s indexed so people can be helped out.

I recently burned a CD of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, Tribe 3, and then installed it onto a secondary hard drive I added to my computer earlier on. I was all excited to get Ubuntu running, but it was a little more than a few clicks for me.

I have a Linksys Wireless WUSB54G network adapter, the ‘USB’ in the name meaning that it is connected to my computer by USB cable. On my first boot from the hard drive, Ubuntu was not able to recognize that I had the adapter; I needed a driver. I googled a bit and everything I found suggested ‘to use ndiswrapper with the driver.’ Now, I was able to get that far, and those who haven’t gotten that far should view my new post about this. Now here was my big problem: ndiswrapper wasn’t showing up in the running modules, but by typing ‘lusb’ I could see that my adapter was there, and ‘ndiswrapper -l’ showed that the driver was installed and the device for that driver was present. I tried using ’sudo modprobe ndiswrapper’, but kept getting an error of ‘FATAL ERROR: Module ndiswrapper not found’.

The solution: You need to update your kernel headers and recompile ndiswrapper. Use this to update the headers:

• From a Terminal, run:

    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

  and run the following for the dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install dh-make fakeroot gcc-3.4 build-essential

The above was taken from the Ubuntu Wiki, just to note. Now this presents a bit of a paradox. On a page where most people are accessing from separate computers merely because the computer they are trying to fix doesn’t have internet interface yet, they tell you to get something that you can only get through an Ubuntu machine. For me, this was a problem, as it was the only Linux computer in the house (Windows and Macs are dominant here) I either had to get debians and use a removable drive to transfer, or temporarily set up an interface that would allow good access. I chose the latter. I moved my computer, my screen, everything, into a room with my router in it, so I could plug in the ethernet cable to get the packages. Both methods should work, one was probably easier than the other, though. Now download the latest version of ndiswrapper, untar to a folder on the desktop, and CD to that folder. Run ‘make distclean clean’, then ‘make’, and finally ’sudo make install’. There should be no errors in the compile this time. Check that the driver is still installed for the adapter. If not, just reinstall it using ‘ndiswrapper -i rt2700usb.inf’ like you did before, with whatever your driver’s inf file is. Reboot and it should now work!

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