I'm new to linux and have installed ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 3000 notebook. It seemed like the best thing to do as the Acer windows installation was not right.

The hardware specs are AMD Sempron 3100+ (2Ghz ?)
512 Mb DDR ram
60 Gb HDD

The OS seems to see the wireless adapter but I'm unable to configure it.

I saw a post that someone put up, claiming that it was a simple task but I am unable even to ascertain what wifi adapter I have.

Acer (South Africa) claims it's an intel chipset (B4 sound familiar) but since the South African model equivalent is an "Inspire" I find this unlikely.

The laptop was purchased at circuit city (NY) in June of 2006

Thanks

To find out the exact chipset on the wireless card, run gnome-terminal and enter
Post back the output.

Thanks for your response.

The network card is as follows;

Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=31926

Try that.

Pleased 2 meet Gnu

I am running a 32bit processor, the link was for a 64 bit. will this make a difference?

Running 32-bit makes it easier.

ndiswrapper is probably already installed. If not, install via Synaptic.

Copy the Windows driver files for your card to a directory. In that directory, run sudo ndiswrapper -i driver_file

Run ndiswrapper -m

Check the installation success with ndiswrapper -l

Visit the ndiswrapper wiki for more help.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m....php/Main_Page

What version of Ubuntu are you running?

The Broadcomm 43xx driver is included with the 2.6.17 kernel, which Ubuntu 6.10 has by default.

If you are running Ubuntu 6.06 running the 2.6.15 kernel, as I do on my older laptop, here's the best thread you want to go to: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...20&mode=linear

Install the fwcutter package from the apt-get sources or if you have to do it the hard way like I did at the time, download the package and install the .deb package, and then follow the rest of the istructions.

fwcutter extracts the lib files from the NDIS windows driver, and you copy it to your /lib/firmware directory, then the WLAN card just acts as a regular installed ethernet adapter. Like on my laptop it's read as eth0.

Hope this helps.

Hi thanks for assistance. I followed the steps suggested and on the final step, I received this.
modprobe bcm43xx
WARNING: Error inserting ieee80211_crypt (/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt.ko): Operation not permitted
WARNING: Error inserting ieee80211 (/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211.ko): Operation not permitted
WARNING: Error inserting ieee80211softmac (/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/kernel/net/ieee80211/softmac/ieee80211softmac.ko): Operation not permitted
FATAL: Error inserting bcm43xx (/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/bcm43xx/bcm43xx.ko): Operation not permitted

My router is a surecom one and it is 802.11g

You ran the modprobe command as root, right?

I assume that my login is root since it is the only login that I have. It is not called root though it is my username.

The links that I followed are here; http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...20&mode=linear

here;
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m....php/Main_Page

and here;
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=31926

in the reverse order.

The network manager is installed and the Wlan light comes on but the manager does not see the card as an option.

Try sudo.

Ugh. Ubuntu.

sudo modprobe bcm43xx asks for my password but does nothing (apparently)

No errors means the operation worked.

After loading the module, set the wireless parameters with iwconfig and then the network parameters with ifconfig.

By the way, you cannot use both the bcm43xx and ndiswrapper modules concurrently. modprobe -r and blacklist the one you are not using.

iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 IEEE 802.11g ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.

ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16:36:2F:86:B6
inet addr:192.168.1.3 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::216:36ff:fe2f:86b6/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:16280 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:9835 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:22136344 (21.1 MiB) TX bytes:967679 (944.9 KiB)
Interrupt:169 Base address:0x1800

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16:CE:36:2A:FB
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:217 Memory:e2000000-e2002000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:100 (100.0 b) TX bytes:100 (100.0 b)

What do I need to do now, modprobe -r does nothing at all

modprobe -r what?

Which driver are you using - bcm43xx or ndiswrapper? Remove the one you're not using and add it to the blacklist so it doesn't load again.

The wireless interface (eth0) is not associated with anything. Set the parameters like SSID and mode with the iwconfig command. If you've done that, and it's still not associating, and assuming there's no security mis-match (WEP, MAC address filtering or WPA on the router) you have a driver issue - either the firmware isn't in the right place for bcm43xx or ndiswrapper isn't installed correctly.