Wireless in Ubuntu with a T60p

[mlilien]

Thanks in advance for any help.

I just installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my new T60p, and haven't been able to get my wireless card recognized. I'm fairly new to linux, so please excuse my ignorance. I've done some looking around, and it looks like I don't have the right drivers. I've tried madwifi with no success (though I've heard of people getting it to work, so it was probably my mistake) and I looked into ndiswrapper, but couldn't figure out what windows drivers to use.

I've got an Intel Pro 3945ABG card, according to the lenovo site, but lscpi -n tells me that I've got an unknown atheron card.

If anybody could help me out here, I'd really appreciate it.

[foofightrs777]

Heh, I had the same problem. I was supposed to get the same card as you but got the Atheros instead. Now, there's thwo ways to go about this madwifi and ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper provided me with faster wireless speeds but would not support WPA until I had already authenticated on the network with the madwifi driver.

Madwifi:

I'm going to be using version 0.9.30.13 as I could not get the latest SVN to compile for some reason.


mkdir madwifi
cd madwifi
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-ha ... 519.tar.gz
mv madwifi-hal-0.9.30.13-r2351-20070519 madwifi
wget http://people.freebsd.org/~sam/ath_hal-20070428.tgz
tar xvzf ath_hal-20070428.tgz
rm -rf ./madwifi/hal/
cp ath_hal-20070428 madwifi/hal -R
cd madwifi
make clean
make
sudo make install


It will give you the option to remove all existing drivers. I did so.

sudo rmmod `lsmod | egrep 'ath|wlan' | sed 's@ .*@@'`
sudo modprobe ath_pci

Now, you should be able to connect to your wireless network.

---------------------------------------
Okay, if you have problems with madwifi's speed and stability (or don't need WPA and don't care about open source freedom) you may want to try ndiswrapper after initially authenticating.

sudo aptitude remove ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils
sudo rm -R /etc/ndiswrapper
sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/s ... .38.tar.gz
tar xvzf ndiswrapper-1.38.tar.gz
cd ndiswrapper-1.38.tar.gz
make uninstall (repeat a few times)
make
sudo make install

Now, goto the lenovo http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-66449 (or if you have already downloaded the driver in Windows it shold be in C:\DRIVERS\WIN\WLLANATH\WINXP_2K In this case please copy the directory to your Uubuntu drive) and extract the driver.

Go into the directory with the INF and type: sudo ndiswrapper -i NET5416.INF

If you still have the madwifi driver running you will need to enter
sudo modprobe -r ath_pci

then to load ndiswrapper:
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Hopefully this works for you. I used a few tutorials and have reconstruct this mostly from memory and some notes I wrote down. Hopefully this will all work for you.

[mlilien]

Thanks for responding. I worked through your madwifi steps, I did a tar after the first wget... and a cd into the madwifi directory before making (I assumed this was what I was supposed to do).

But when I used this command:
sudo rmmod `lsmod | egrep 'ath|wlan' | sed 's@ .*@@'`
It told me that there was no module name given. Like I said, I'm fairly new to linux, so I'm not sure whether I did something wrong, or if you mistyped something in the command.

[foofightrs777]

That command is there to make sure you don't already have the module loaded. As long as everything compiled properly feel free to give madwifi a shot with: sudo modprobe ath_pci

And yes you're right, I forgot to tell you to cd into the madwifi directory to build it. Ack. I've editted my post to include that now. But, hopefully this works for you. let me know if you have any further issues or questions. Also, hopefully someone can clear up why installing madwifi makes WPA available.

[mlilien]

That worked perfectly. Thanks a lot.

So, let me see if I understand this correctly. If I'm on an unsecured network, I can use the ndiswrapper (and it'll be faster?), but if I'm on a secured network, I have to disable ndiswrapper, then enable madwifi, and then I can enable ndiswrapper again, and it'll work on the secured network?

For instance, if I'm going from an unsecured network to a secured one,
do I want to run:
modprobe -r ndiswrapper
modprobe ath_pci
get onto the network
and then run
modprobe -r ath_pci
modprobe ndiswrapper

[MeaninglessNick]

Madwifi is in the Debian repositories, so I would expect if you add the correct repositories to your /etc/sources.list, you can then use module-assistant to compile and install the module. It is then literally a couple of keystrokes to update to the latest version. This is what I do on my x40

You might ask on Ubuntu forums, that seems like the kind of thing they would know about.

[foofightrs777]

That worked perfectly. Thanks a lot.

So, let me see if I understand this correctly. If I'm on an unsecured network, I can use the ndiswrapper (and it'll be faster?), but if I'm on a secured network, I have to disable ndiswrapper, then enable madwifi, and then I can enable ndiswrapper again, and it'll work on the secured network?

For instance, if I'm going from an unsecured network to a secured one,
do I want to run:
modprobe -r ndiswrapper
modprobe ath_pci
get onto the network
and then run
modprobe -r ath_pci
modprobe ndiswrapper

Yup you got it. After the initial connection with madwifi to a WPA secured network it seems the ndiswrapper will then allow you to use WPA. I'm unsure of why this is (maybe something to do with the HAL?).

Yeah you have the right idea. with the commands.
Also, you might find lsmod useful to list your loaded modules.


Just make sure you unload the one driver before loading the other. I've made the mistake of not doing so and have froze my system.

[mlilien]

So, the madwifi method seems to be working fine on my unsecured home wireless. However, I only get a 35% signal strength, whereas I get 100% when I'm in vista.

I tried the ndiswrapper method, and it couldn't find the network.

Any idea why this might be?

[foofightrs777]

I think I read somewhere that this was out of 60 rather than 100. I don't know if it's true...

Still, I'm able to connect at 54mbps so I'm not too concerned.

[Dead1nside]

I think I read somewhere that this was out of 60 rather than 100. I don't know if it's true...

Still, I'm able to connect at 54mbps so I'm not too concerned.

I also read that the Madwifi drivers incorrectly report the strength to NetworkManager or something along those lines. I too was worried at how poor the signal visually looked.