NetGear WG511v2 wlan card on Ubuntu Edgy

I am at my parents home in Glashütte at the moment. They have T-DSL (the Call & Surf Comfort package from T-Com Germany), but it was not working completely for one or the other reason…

So, since “I am a specialist in configuring T-DSL”, I spent yesterday morning with setting up the router and this morning with placing the router at a place where it is better accessible from clients. As a result, my parents (as well as me and my brothers ;-) have WLAN access at home now. The connection is made through the WLAN router that is part of the standard package and Computers can use the (of course encoded) hotspot.

Since I will have this in our new flat as well, I bought a PCMCIA WLAN card from NetGear yesterday. It’s the WG511v2 model, supporting 802.11b/g. I thought it is no problem to get this work on Ubuntu, but it turned out to be not quite straight forward. Some German blogs gave me hints on how to install it, and I will go for a short instruction for (non-German-speaking) people who are in the same situation as I…

NetGear WG511v2 PCMCIA WLAN card on Ubuntu Edgy:

First, check whether the model was identified correctly – in a shell type sudo lspci. The output should contain this line: 0000:06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03). This means, that the card is correctly identified.

Now, it’s time to install some packages. Get a connection (LAN, modem) and install the packages wireless-tools and ndiswrapper-utils-1.8. For the latter, the version is very important! ndiswrapper-utils comes with the versions 1.1 and 1.8 on Ubuntu Edgy – and by default the 1.1 is installed. This version does not work, you will need 1.8! You can install the packages via apt on the shell: sudo apt-get install wireless-tools ndiswrapper-utils-1.8. As usual, dependencies are resolved automatically.

When the packages are present, you need to convert the Windows2000 driver (the .inf file) with ndiswrapper and install it. I didn’t figure out what ndiswrapper is all about, but it somehow converts .inf driver files to another format and thus makes the card working on the linux kernel. First, put the installation CD that came with the card into your CDROM drive and mount it. It’s usually mounted on /media/cdrom/ automatically. On the shell, cd into /media/cdrom/Driver/Windows\ 2000, that’s the place where the WG511v2.INF file lives. Then type sudo ndiswrapper -i WG511v2.INF to install the driver. It’s important to do this in the CD directory rather than copying the file anywhere else. The ndiswrapper tool seems to need other files from this directory as well… that’s a pitfall I tapped into ;-). You can now type ndiswrapper -l, to check whether everything is right. The output should look like this:

Installed drivers:
wg511v2 driver installed, hardware present

Load the module ndiswrapper into the kernel: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper. If everything is ok, you should see the green LED blink – the card is installed. You can proceed to configure the card with System->Administration->Networks or manually via an entry in /etc/network/interfaces. The card appears as wlan0 interface.

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