Update : Improved instructions available on a more recent post here.
I have been using ndiswrapper for wireless support for some time now due to the Core 2 Duo Macbook series not working with the madwifi drivers. You may remember a previous tutorial I wrote on Configuring Wireless using ndiswrapper. That tutorial is all fine and great if you don’t mind a little non-free running in your blood. This tutorial will let you use the more free madwifi system, but it may only work on Ubuntu 7.10.
Can one of the Ubuntu packagers get this into Gutsy? The current package version is too old from what I can tell.
On with the show…
To get the driver support (until a proper package is created) we’ll need to compile it from source. If you’re not familiar with doing that you should be fine in this case as I’ve outlined the steps as best I can. If you run into any weirdness leave a comment and we might be able to get you figured out. Follow the below commands and you should be fine.
sudo aptitude install build-essentialwget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.13-current.tar.gz
tar -zxvf madwifi [tab]
cd madwifi [tab]
make
sudo make install (answer 'r' when asked about previous modules)
at this point you should be able to reboot and wireless should work. I have tested it with unencrypted and WEP connections, but not had a chance for WPA yet. Anyone able to verify functionality with WPA?
Also, if you have followed my previous tutorial on using ndiswrapper you’ll want to make sure that module doesn’t load at boot anymore. (You may want to leave it installed as a backup driver or something, but remove the line ‘ndiswrapper’ from the /etc/modules file.) Enjoy.
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