I have an Acer 3004WLMi, which is of the same series as yours (with the wireless enable button in the front of the laptop). It seems the native drivers that come with Ubuntu (or others?) don't work right out of the box, though I read some messages with several different kinds of instructions on how to try and correct the situation. Nonetheless I had no time to investigate, I'll get back to the native drivers later, but with ndiswrapper your worries are gone in a minute.
First make sure (I'm pretty sure) you have the same card as I do:
Code:
lspci | grep Broadcom
that should give something like
Quote:
|
Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
|
So the card (on this laptop) is Broadcom 4318 thingie. I think Acer 3000 series (all) should have this card.
Next you'll need to download a package which includes the drivers and a fancy ndiswrapper setup script that installs them automatically:
compwiz18.blackhole.cx/bcm4318/get.php?file=bcm4318.all.tar.gz
download the file to your home directory, maybe create a new directory for it and extract the contents there. You'll get three files, one of which is called
ndiswrapper_setup. Now open up a console/terminal emulator,
cd into the directory where you extracted the contents of the package file (i.e. where the script is) and run the script as root:
Code:
sudo ./ndiswrapper_setup
it prints some stuff to your screen and if everything goes well, that's it. Next what you do is click the button to enable your wireless card and it should light up, if the drivers were correctly installed. After this use your favourite network manager tool (found in Gnome's menu or if using KDE, use KWirelessAssistant) to enable the wireless device (probably called
eth1 or
wlan0 depending on the system); the program should ask you for WEP keys if any.
If the light doesn't turn on, and your wireless doesn't still work, try rebooting the machine. It should not be needed, but some graphic drivers (kernel stuff) require a reboot to function correctly, so it's always a try. If it still does not work, you could check out this thread (for Acer users; was not needed for me, so I think 3000 series does not need this):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224350
Basically what you need for your card to work, is (in case native drivers don't work right out of the box):
- Windows drivers (inf file)
- ndiswrapper and dependencies (usually installed on Ubuntu already)
- use ndiswrapper to install the drivers
If your card isn't the same Broadcom card I have then you'll naturally need to obtain different drivers; you can nevertheless use
ndiswrapper to install them, and it should still be fairly easy, but like I said I think your Acer has that card and in that case simply download the package with drivers and run the script, it does the work for you. If you're interested, read what the script actually does and learn the procedure (& become wiser):
Code:
less ndiswrapper_setup
I hope this helps you out. I got my laptop workig very easily with that script, bought a wireless router and now I'm online with no problems
