My Wireless laptop card is a DWL-G650 (d-link) which was supposed to work with
the madwifi drivers in hoary but did not because the firmware is too new. So I decided to manually install the drivers. Here is my (rough) howto.
WARNING: If you are uncomfortable with manipulating kernel modules or at all unfamiliar with such concepts do not use this HOWTO. In addition this is bleeding edge software and as such may not work as advertised. You have been warned!
It is worth pointing out that ndiswrapper often works with atheros chipsets and should be preferred if the above applies to you. For a howto on this see, for example,
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=31926
0) Install the basic development packages for Ubuntu (see another HOWTO)
1) Install the linux-headers package for your kernel. Make sure carefully that the headers package you install correspond with your version of the kernel you have installed. So I have linux-image-2.6.10-5-686-smp installed so I installed linux-headers-686-smp as well as linux-headers-2.6.10-5-686-smp
2) Install the linux-source package and set up (If not already done):
cd /usr/src
sudo tar jxvf linux-source-2.6.10.tar.bz2
ln -s linux-source-2.6.10.tar.bz2 linux
3) Install the sharutils package
4) Grab the latest madwifi source tarball from here
http://madwifi.otaku42.de/madwifi-cvs-current.tar.bz2
and decompress
tar jxvf madwifi-cvs-current.tar.bz2
4)a As of mid July it looks like they have changed the driver so instead download and uncompress
http://madwifi.otaku42.de/2005/07/ma...-07-01.tar.bz2
5) Go into the madwifi directory created by step 4) and type
sudo make clean
sudo make
sudo make install
6) All going well you should now have the drivers in
/lib/modules/2.6.10 (a new subdirectory) but now you need to replace the existing drivers. These are in four places:
Assuming you have the standard kernel installed (2.6.10-5-386) they are:
/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386//kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath_pci.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386//kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath_hal/ath_hal.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386//kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath_rate/onoe/ath_rate_onoe.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386//kernel/drivers/net/wireless/net80211/wlan*.ko (TOTAL of six files here)
A total of 9 files in all which should be the number of files in /lib/modules/2.6.10
(Note if you use the 2.6.10-5-686-smp kernel replace 2.6.10-5-386 with 2.6.10-5-686-smp in the paths above)
So now all you do is replace all the first 9 files with the corresponding new files in /lib/modules/2.6.10. As an example
sudo cp /lib/modules/2.6.10/ath_pci.ko /lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386//kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath_pci.ko
and so on .....
reboot and the madwifi drivers will now hopefully work as expected. See
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/WiFi...sesRouterHowTo
Step 0) for further instructions....
You can now trash ndiswrapper Yay!
One downside to all this is that everytime a new kernel is installed all this needs repeating (groan). Of course breezy will have the latest madwifi driver
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