Thinkpads Forum

Hello there -

Does anyone know if it is possible to get the wireless card (Intel WiFi Link 5300) working with Ubuntu? The brand new R500 originally came with vista which was then 'downgraded' to dual boot both XP and Ubuntu. Everything works in XP and Ubuntu except the wireless on the linux partition. I'm not concerned with getting 'n' speeds working - just working with b/g would be fine. Thanks in advance.

It would appear that the drivers are available from Intel according to this article

Hopefully you can do a bit of research from here to find the actual driver.

Been checking a couple of other sites which list cards and their compatibility with Linux:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Hardw ... el#miniPCI

and

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_part ... name=Intel

which don't actually list your card, but it's possible that both posts may be a tad out of date.

To find out the chipset, could you post the output of Also as a matter of interest, which distro are you using?

Is it worth checking out Thinkwiki?

Good luck!

I'm trying out ubuntu 8.04 - when I iwconfig I get "no wireless extension" for both Lo and eth0 (see below). I read on some site to run: "lspci -nn | grep 14e4" in the shell and I get ...."bcm 5787m" - however it does say something about gigabit Ethernet so I figured I was looking at my ethernet adapter and not my wireless chipset...???



I'm new to the linux os and need to learn more. I'm not really sure how to approach my problem. Any help is greatly appreciated.

It is pretty new so I doubt the driver is present in 8.04. In fact, from this annoucement, I'm pretty sure it isn't:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/l ... nel/960713

So the driver came out just last month... definitely not going to be there by default.

See this solution: ubuntuforums thread on iwl5000.

The other alternative is trying to use ndiswrapper to load the windows driver.

forgive my ignorance but is ndiswrapper a program I need to download or is that some type of command? Thanks for your help!

I would try aaa's first solution first.

I'm not sure of your level of experience in using the terminal, but you copy and paste one line of code at a time and hit enter to run it, not all the lines together! Apologies if you already know this, but so many people starting out make this mistake!

If you get any error messages, can you post them back here. Alternatively and better, get signed up to Ubuntu forums and post there since there are more people there.

Ndiswrapper allows Windows wireless card drivers to be used on Linux OS's.

For more on it, readhere.

The Ubuntu documents page on it is here.

Note that it's referring to the broadcom driver throughout.

To use it with your card, you will need to find the Windows drivers and identify the .inf and .sys files that should be with it, since ndiswrapper uses those.

A good troubleshooting guide is here.

Yes, you definitely DON"T want to mess with ndiswrapper unless you must. Usually Broadcom wireless chips require this.

iwl5000 will be what you want, Intel is one of the best supported wireless chipsets in Linux. I have an Intel Pro Wireless 2915abg in my 600x, and it uses the ipw2200 driver.

Another thing to note is that if you have your wireless turned off, like via hotkeys or an outside switch, it usually won't show up in lscpi. Also eth0 should be your wired network, and lo is your "loop-back" adapter.

aaa's solution on the Ubuntu forums should work. This shows you how to download the source code and compile it for your system. If you have trouble, feel free to ask.

thanks everyone - I managed to attempt the ndiswrapper however it did not work. I'll try aaa's method and get back to you all. Thanks again.

I just wanted to say thanks for everyone's input. My 1st attempt at following aaa's solution failed. I assume because I had attempted numerous other methods that somehow jacked up some files. After blowing away ubuntu and reloading it fresh - I was able to follow the suggestions made by aaa and successfully get my wifi card working. Thanks again!

FYI, iwl5000 is built into the 2.6.26 Linux kernel. Since this kernel is currently in Debian Lenny/Testing, it's probably already in Ubuntu backports, should you be considering upgrading to 2.6.26 or the next Ubuntu.

(2.6.26 has not done much for me, for what its worth, unlike say 2.6.24 and its power savings, but 2.6.26 does provide better built-in hardware support, such as the iwl situation here, as well as the wireless LED via thinkpad-acpi.)