Ubuntu v7 is not recognizing wirless card...help

I've just installed Ubuntu v7 onto my laptop (dual boot) with xp...
everything works great, exept ubuntu does not see my Netgear WG511 v2 wireless card, i've installed ndiswrapper utility and the network manager, but nothing...
anyone has any suggestions?

Omarcarr

What’s the chipset (i.e., the output of “lspci” will tell us)?

not sure what that means... "Lspci"... am sort of a beginner....

Sorry about that…

Each wireless card has a specific chip it uses. What chip it uses will tell us what driver to use (a driver is kind of like an interface between software and hardware). One would think that specifying a “make and model” as you did (i.e., Netgear WG511 v2) would be enough, but, unfortunately, wifi card manufacturers often like to keep the same “model number” but change the chip on a certain card. This is why it is safest to see what the chip is by whatever the computer reports the chip as — an alternative route would be to open your pcmcia card (it is pcmcia, correct?), find the chip, and see if you can read the chip model number… .

Fortunately, people have built a database that correlates the pci id reported by the kernel to a chipset for devices that use the pci bus. The program that uses this database is called lspci. To run it, open up a terminal, and then type “lspci” and hit the enter key at the prompt. Then copy and paste the output (highlighting with a mouse copies, middle-click pastes) to your next post.

Hello OSOR;
Thanks for the explanation, I managed to run the "lspci", interesting thing is while having the Netgear WG511 v.2 card inserted and running the "lspci", i noticed the driver or chip as you say is very much different than the manufature you would think would be for Netgear; here is what i foun:
Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03.

Hope this helps... now i realize according to certain search results i found, that i would need to use version 3 for the wg511; is this true?

thanks for your help

Omar

I don’t think there is a version 3 of wg511. The “rev 3” most likely indicates the third revision for the chipset.

According to certain search results I found, you seem to have the Taiwan-manufactured v2 rather than the China-made v.2 (notice the clever use of a “dot” in v.2 versus the lack of said dot in v2 — this is what I was talking about earlier with the reliability of lscpi versus manufacturer labels). The latter is fully supported with native linux drivers, whereas the former still needs some work in reverse engineering (see the libertas driver). So bad news: you can’t use native linux drivers (yet) with your card. Good news: you can use ndiswrapper to wrap the windows drivers for use on linux.

Now to get ndiswrapper working with Ubuntu, I refer you to this. You need to be able to get at the .sys and .inf files from the windows executable at the netgear website. Fortunately, someone has already done this (download the packaged result here). Hope that helps.

P.S., here is another guide that has specific instructions if you don’t have internet access at all on your laptop (i.e., you have to copy over some files from a different computer to which you have internet access).

HI... thanks for you information... although i followed it to the letter, it is still not working; the windows intallation driver program in ubuntu accepted the .inf driver but did not listed in the window afterwards.
question; if the Win installion program does only accepts .inf files then why have the .sys file as well? another thing i read in previous postings that (particulary in the ubuntu fiesty docs) which list the supported wifi cards (Netgear WG511 v2); it mentions that one would need to replace this v2 driver with an updated v3 from netgear's site, is this what needs to be done?

Thanks for all of your help.

Omar

Listen, before any confusion takes place here:

There is only ONE Netgear WG 511v2 card, and this is the "Made in China" card with the infamous Marvell Libertas chipset. Everything else you read about this card in the net, like that it has a Prism-compatible chipset is plain wrong.

The Netgear WG 511v2 will definitly work on Linux with ndiswrapper (Google for it, if you still dont get it together, ask here again, I'll help you) and on OpenBSD natively with the "malo" driver. I hope someone will port this driver to Linux soon.

Thanks for reading,
Have a nice day

I though this was the case; i've done all the research i could possibly do for this Netgear (WG511G China) and have used the appropiate driver recommended to use. In fact since i have a partitioned drive which also has XP installed and which uses the WG511G driver, i've been able to install both recommended XP and 2000 driver for Marvell Libertas chipset. But everytime i try to install them, ndiswrappe says "driver already installed"; needless to say, it is not working yet... Device Driver sees it at Netgear manufacture and as a Marvell Libertas chipset... i believe the pcii starts with "1180.."

any help?

thanks

Omar

post the output of ndiswrapper -l

Hi everyone, I am new to this forum and pretty new with linux, I have been playing around with my laptop running ubuntu 7.04 and I have the same problems with my WG511v2 card. I have the made in China card, I have tried installing a few drivers from other how-to 's, but no luck. This is what I get.....

$ ndiswrapper -l
wg511v2 : invalid driver!

$ ndiswrapper -r wg511v2
couldn't delete /etc/ndiswrapper/wg511v2: Inappropriate ioctl for device

$ lspci
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)

ok so i removed the wg511v2 dir from etc/ndiswrapper/ manually

I now try to install and this is the error that I get

# ndiswrapper -i wg511v2.inf
installing wg511v2 ...
couldn't open wg511v2.inf: No such file or directory at /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper-1.9 line 174.

Save the pain, buy a WG511T like i JUST did. Its not worth the effort. Only $30 AUS from HT.com.au

Good luck

sounds like an idea... how does the linux programers get this message and have fixes posted for updates?

The problem isn't with Linux developers, it's with the hardware manufacturers.