Making a Netgear WNA3100 adapter work with Ubuntu 12
 

I installed Lubuntu 12.04 on an old IBM Thinkpad T20 I had lying around. This laptop does not have an integrated Wifi device, so I tried to use a couple of external adapters I had lying around.

The first one I tried was a Netgear WNA3100. I found quite a few references online that they would work with a little effort - for example this and this. In short, one has to install Ndiswrapper, get the right driver (in my case bcmwlhigh5) from here, use ndiswrapper -i with that, and watch out for possible configuration issues (as the first link discusses).

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work. Now if I type ndiswrapper -l I get:

bcmwlhigh5: driver installed
device (0846:9020) present

which apparently is good. However, if I type sudo dmesg -c I get nothing at all. Using nm-tool only shows the wired connection.

What other information can I provide to make more sense of this? It looks like things changed somehow between Ubuntu 11 and 12 there, so solutions for 11 don't seem to help much now.

I am also having the same problem

Iwas at 11.10 & upgraded to 12.04 and my Netgear usb dongle stopped working. In a wireless only environment :-(

I get this :

Module could not be loaded. Error was:

WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper, it will be ignored in a future release.
FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found.

Is the ndiswrapper module installed?

when I try to Install a new driver i from the Wirless Network Driver tool.

bcmwlhigh5 shows in the tool as
Hardware present : Yes

There is a faint blue led light on the device (very much dimmer than when it was working under 11.10)

dmesg (what ever that is - it appears to be a listing of everything attached to the motherboard) does NOT have an entry for ndiswrapper

LSUSB lists ID 0846:9020 NetGear , Inc. WNA3100(v1) Wireless-N 300 [Broadcom BCM43231]


I am a newbie (once upon a time I did AIX... and SCO Xenix )

There is a swamp of articles on WNA3100. But oh; to make any sense of them !

If you can help please assume I am an idiot - I still have not worked out how to download bits and pieces (common references to bits of ndiswrapper) to a USB stick and then how to get said bits and pieces to install on the Ubuntu box.

One helpful looking article said 'recompile ndiwrapper using gurgle scretch phewy plok' (in other words; if you don't speak UNIX/Ubuntu it was totally meaningless ) - with no further explanation - nor have I yet to find anywhere with a simple concise INCLUSIVE explanation of how to (re-)compile something,

I really like Ubuntu please could all you nice people who help us newbies - please assume I can type; cut & paste - nothing more !

This one may fix it for you
 

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...rrerid=1620502


see post #22 - it explains it all in easy to understand English I used the 1.57 version of ndiswrapper

I still get nothing when I do
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

but my network is UP and RUNNING !!!

just have to check it is robust through a boot or two ...

--> later --> booted fine back on the UBUNTU box and off the work's win7 (ugh !)

I have to report a partial success. As suggested in the thread quoted in the post above (this one), I tried recompiling ndiswrapper version 1.58rc1 (the latest development version) from scratch, and using the version of the drivers available there.

Well, the wlan interface went up and started scanning, but I couldn't connect to my home Wifi. I double checked and the password was right, and the router was set not to blacklist any MAC address (not wise, I know, but I set it this way for this test), but only to use WPA2 for authentication. No success. I tried the infamous Netgear adapter on two other Windows computers, and it worked straight away. It still wouldn't work putting it back in my laptop.

So I tried to change the 802.11 mode on my router. It was set to "Up to 300Mbps", which I guess is N. Setting it to "Up to 145Mbps" (maybe G?) still wouldn't work. But setting it to "Up to 54 Mbps" worked.

So, it looks like the issue is solved, but I still consider it a partial success only, and don't feel marking this thread with [SOLVED] is the right thing to do. There still are issues to iron out.

To start with, the connection gets dropped during updates. Relaunching ndiswrapper or even restarting were not enough, I had to uninstall ndiswrapper, recompile and reinstall. I might have done something wrong there, but the other unsatisfying aspect is having to lower the speed of the Wifi network to connect. I can certainly do this in my house, but when on the move I cannot expect people to mess with their setting with my convenience. Furthermore this adapter works at full speed with other computers.

mine is connected to a D-Link router and will run at all speeds with no (apparent) problem.

Is it worth trying the 1.57 ndiswrapper ? I have always assumed that an "rc" may still be buggy !

I just tried the 1.57 version that comes packaged with Ubuntu, and the result is still the same. Connection is lost when packages are involved (installing, updating and so on), although it's a bit more reliable. And it still doesn't connect to my Wifi setup unless I configure the router to go for 54 Mbps.

Any more suggestions?