ubuntu linksys wireless
 

I have both PC and Mac. Four years ago I purchased a Xandros distro but was never able to make it work with a wireless adapter. Disappointed and angry, I crumpled it and threw it in the garbage.

A few days ago I purchased a copy of LINUX FORMAT magazine with a copy of Ubuntu 9.10. Certain that after four years, the wireless problem surely would be solved, so, I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 in one of my computers. Sadly I could not connect with the wireless adapter and find myself back at the, for me, ndiswrapper nerdy command-line gobbledygook.

Aarghh . . . foiled again!!! I wonder how many other would be Linux users have simply given up over the wireless problem? Surely among the thousands of experts in the world, someone can create an inexpensive disc to solve the wireless adapter problem with Linux.

Tinsley Grey Sammons
bastiatlaw@aol.com

1) First look in your Menu for an item called something like "Hardware Drivers" or "Restricted Hardware Drivers" - does it show that anything is detected? If it is, click on the button marked "Activate". It can be slow so wait a few minutes. If it work, job done!

2) Second, if that does not work, you need to know what chipset your driver has. Open a Terminal and input either: lspci
or: lsusb
Copy and paste the result here.

The problem is, very simply, the fault of the hardware manufacturers. They don't want to release the documentation on their hardware that would allow drivers to quickly and (relatively) easily be created. Instead, kernel developers have to spend countless hours reverse engineering the existing drivers to come up with their own.

Until the hardware vendors lighten up, there isn't much anyone on the Linux side can do to help the situation.

Getting wireless to work under Linux can certainly be a challenge, but unfortunately in most cases it isn't something Linux developers have the ability to fix. The issue is that wireless drivers are still almost always proprietary, and are written for the OS by the manufacturer. In many cases it isn't even legal to include the driver in a distribution. So Windows and Mac get the drivers written for them, by the actual manufacturer. Anyone else has to develop the drivers themselves, and since the source code isn't released, this can be a very difficult task.

If manufacturers wrote the drivers for Linux, it would work just as well as it does under Windows.

At least that is my understanding of the state of affairs. Someone correct me if I've gotten something wrong.

[Edit: ack, someone beat me to it, and said it much better than I did :)]