Greetings,

Long time Windows user here; limited line command experience from early computer learning; Just wiped my drive and installed Ubuntu. How do I install a driver for the netgear wireless adapter - it was already installed in the machine. I've downloaded the driver believed to work. What next? Also, any instruction on educating myself on Linux/Ubuntu basics? Thanks in advance!

You'll start getting more experience :-)

Usually most of the drivers you need will come with your distribution and you shouldn't need to manually download them. Indeed the manual downloading an installation of drivers that many windows users seem to want to do is more often than no the wrong approach with most linux distributions.

So, the fist thing we need to do is find out what this wireless adaptor actually is. A "netgear wireless adapter" could possibly be any number of things. That can be done on the command line with the following command
Please cut and paste the output of this into your next post.

The lspci command lists hardware on your machine and "grep -E 'Ether|Wireless'" just selects the lines we are interested in. With this information we can workout what driver should be used.


Many find http://rute.2038bug.com/ to be a good introduction to linux.

Cheers,

Evo2.

Here's my controller as instructed. Thanks for the info by the way!

02:07.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. Atheros AR5001X+ Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
02:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 10)

I think that chip uses the ath9k driver which should be in your kernel if the version is 2.6.28 or newer

Please try the following command to ensure the driver is loaded in the kernel:

And then please run the following two commands and post the output
Evo2.

Start off by getting rid of Ubuntu, download slackware, install it, then install the drivers for your card.
http://slackware.com/getslack/
http://slackbuilds.org/result/?search=Atheros&sv=13.0

IF you follow my advice, I will guide you young LinuxWalker.
All the way down the rabbit hole into slack, where you will truly find yourself.

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I appreciate the input and help! At this stage of the game, my work time is a bit too demanding to engage formally in the learning curve needed for proper slackware training. But........I will begin the process. Need a bit of a GUI to aid my processes on the short term. Can't sink too far too quickly.... I have another machine that is sitting idle at the moment. It is a perfect candidate for that adventure.

Greetings: Keyed in the first sudo as instructed, it returned a request for my password, but then zero output; just went back to the terminal point with empty space after the colon. The second instruction returned a wealth of information before i could even hit enter? Would completely fill up the quote/reply screen and then a small bit on down. Not sure what all that was about, but going to have to turn in. I'll do some research and try it again tomorrow or Friday. Thanks for the instruction and direction.

That's good, no errors. That means that you have the driver.

The second two commands provided information about your system sees your network devices: they are important to show that the device really is recongnized correctly.

Evo2.

Nonsense dear friend! Slackware 13.0 is fully loaded with the latest and greatest GUI's available. I assure you, Slackware is the easiest OS to familiarize yourself with. Your wifi would have been done last night had you listened. :P

If you really must behave like a total dick, would you mind doing it elsewhere?

Evo2.

ok fine....

try this dude,

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

seeing is you have the ath9k module installed, that SHOULD get ur card working.
Seeing is no one else here can give you a straight answer there is it.

elsheepo, ok, I typed and hit "post" a little to hastily: I apologize.

The OP has been off line for the past 15 hours. I'm waiting to see what the output of ifconfig and iwconfig are. Until he reports back, there is not much point telling him to try to bring up the interface, or dangle other random distros in front of him.

Evo2.

evo2 - have just sent a visitor message to your profile - please erase when read. thanks

Evo2 if he has the correct module dynamically loaded into his kernel, and the card is shown in his lspci output, there's nothing else to do than bring the interface up.

a quick google search gave me this..
http://www.wireless-driver.com/downl...nd-Chipset.htm
perhaps he wants the madwifi driver for his specific card.