Hello there! Just installed Karmic Koala on my Intel Macbook via Virtualbox and cannot get wireless working. Previously did this with 9.04 and everything worked.

$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

Do I need to use ndiswrapper? I don't remember having to do that before.

Thank you for your time.

Cheers ~

You want your wireless card to work inside your virtualbox? If that's the case you can't.

Virtual box emulates all hardware, so your wireless card won't be availble.

You have to enable the network adapter, and select nat to share your host network.

It worked before when running 9.04 in a virtualbox on this same macbook.

Network adapter enabled by default in VB. [PCnet - FAST III (NAT)]. Same setting as last time.

Virtual box does not give you direct access to your hardware. It comunicates trough your host OS. For example, you don't have any PCnet - FAST III installed, do you. What is happening is that virtualbox emulates the existence of that card so that Ubuntu, or any other operating system can use it like it uses a real card.

There are expceptions to what I've just said. There is the "Virtual USB Controllers" that permits to plug any usb device directly to the whithout driver on the Host OS. That is useful for example when you have usb devices that don't have linux drivers and you want them to work on your Linux machine trough a windows guest OS. The virtual Usb controllers is a proprietary function that is not available in VirtualBox OSE.
Either way, thats not the case here. Your are talking about your built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi wireless, and this is not an usb card so even if you had the enterprise version of VirtualBox, you can't have it working under Ubuntu on a virtual machine.

Are you sure you are not making any kind of confusion.

Thanks for your quick replies. Although I do understand (more or less) that VB is simply emulating the existence of cards - correct, I do not have a PCnet card - I do know that somehow, I was previously able to connect to the internet wirelessly via my guest OS which was Ubuntu 9.04 at that time. Since updating to 9.10, I now cannot do that.

got it working -

so I thought more about what you said, about VB communicating through the host OS, and I went back into the settings of my VB and changed the connection from NAT to Bridged and then under "name" checked en1: AirPort.

So now it looks like this: PCnet-FAST III (Bridged adapter, en1: AirPort)

And it works. So, if I am to understand this correctly, the problem was not that Ubuntu was not directly recognizing my airport card; because it is running in a virtual machine, the problem was that the guest OS (Ubuntu) was not communicating correctly with the host (OSX) regarding the wireless card.

Because in Ubuntu, under preferences / network connections, there is nothing listed under Wireless, and only Auto eth0 under Wired. Yet I am now connected to the internet wirelessly.

What is interesting to me is that I copied down the configuration from before, and I did not have to change the connection from NAT to Bridged previously.

I think I've made a confusion on what you really want. You want to connect to the Internet trough virtual box but you don't want to make your wireless card work inside virtual box. If that's the case try to install the virtual-box-guest additions and virtual-box-ose-guest-utils int the guest(Ubuntu).

Exactly. I'm glad it worked.

thanx :-)