Alright so I installed the newest version of Kubuntu onto my Gateway M320X laptop. I soon found out that damn my onboard intell wifi chip wasn't working. So I downloaded ndiswrapper and tried to install it but I could login as root to do make install. So what is going on here?

Hello. I'm not terribly familiar with Ubuntu, it doesn't want to install on my system, but I just wrangled ndiswrapper, so I'll take a crack here. When running "make install" did you "sudo" or "su"? "sudo" often gives me trouble, so I normally just use "su". I'd suggest trying that...

I can't use su because then it ask me for a password and when installing kubuntu it never gives you a root password so that's why you gotta use sudo when using commands that ask for root actions.

I guess that's how I interpreted it.

No root access? Wow... Well, try "sudo bash" then, that'll open up a root shell for ya, like "su". Be careful now, power corrupts and all.

All you need to do is: sudo make install
When it asks for a password, enter the password you set up Kubuntu with. Sudo grants you temporary root status. It takes a bit to get used to with Ubuntu and the like, but it's not that bad.

But I did type sudo make install and I put in my password and it didn't work. I think I shall go through it again and I will paste what I did.

Whoa, ok hold on a second, WHERE did you download Ndiswrapper from? Do this isntead of compiling it, see how it works for you:

First off, make sure you have your Kubuntu Install CD in your drive when you do this. If you have a fresh install, and haven't mucked around with your repositories at all, you should still have the CD-ROM as a repo. Go to the command line and do the following:

This will put you at a password prompt. Enter your normal password, now you are root.

Make sure that you have your install CD in the drive, apt will pull the ndiswrapper-utils package from the CD and install it, no muss no fuss.

So for example, I type in ndiswrapper -i /home/olly/drivers/bcmwl5.inf

So, at this point, if everything has worked without errors, you will have installed your wireless driver. Check this by:

This will show all the available network devices... you should see one that is your card, and will return a bunch of info about it. To connect to your Wireless AP, type:

Now if you run iwconfig again, you will see that your card is associated with your AP. The last step then is:

This will get you an IP.

So for a real world example, if I was doing this on my laptop, it would like like this:

That would get me on the internet after a fresh Ubuntu/Kubuntu install. You could also skip the 'sudo -s' and just type 'sudo' in front of every command, either way works fine.

Cheers, let me know if you have any questions, need any clarification.

Once you make it this far, let me know, and I'll write up a guide on editin your /etc/network/interfaces file so that you can have it grab your wireless signal automatically on boot.

-olly

I feel so happy now that I got it to work. So now how do I make it boot up with wifi without having to punch in dhclient everytime?

ok there's one problem I gotta keep typing in dhclient from time to time because it seems like it just loses the IP but I know I have %100 connection were I'm at.