Get a wireless connection working in Linux

One of the most common sources of frustration with Linux is that it can be very tricky to get wireless network adapters to work. Although some will work first time, many others don’t have any suitable Linux drivers.

Thankfully help is at hand thanks to a project called the NDISwrapper. This software can take the Windows drivers for hardware and let Ubuntu use them instead. In this article, which concludes our recent series of features on Ubuntu, we’ll show you how to use it.

What are drivers?
Any piece of hardware that you connect to a PC, such as a printer or scanner, requires something called a driver. This is essentially a bit of software that tells the computer how to work with the hardware device. Drivers are created by the hardware manufacturers and they decide which operating systems are supported – and many of us know the frustration caused when a new version of Windows is released and a company decides not to update their drivers to work with it.

The problem with Linux is that with fewer people using it, there is less incentive for companies to spend the time and effort designing drivers. Admittedly, the situation is better than a few years ago and often the necessary drivers will be supplied on the Ubuntu disc. But this is no comfort if your particular hardware is not supported. Unsupported wireless network adapters are a problem because they are one of the most vital devices for most people.

However, all is not lost if your hardware does not work immediately after installing Ubuntu, as there are plenty of ways to get it working – and it can be very simple. The work of adding drivers to Ubuntu is ongoing, so the required code may have been added since Ubuntu was released.

If you can plug into a broadband router using a wired network connection and run the update program the hardware may suddenly start working. The Update Manager should start automatically after it realises that the internet is available, otherwise click on the System menu and then on Administration and Update Manager.

If this doesn’t work, the software NDISwrapper should help. It can use the Windows drivers for a device, so it doesn’t matter if no specific Linux driver exists. This process is a little complicated, but in this article we’ll explain how to use it.

Non-open source drivers
Before proceeding with NDISwrapper there is another method to try. Ubuntu can use a variety of software and drivers, but does not because they are not properly open source. In the last issue of Computeractive, for instance, we installed the restricted software in order to play MP3 and Flash files.

However, it’s not just multimedia software that gets excluded, as more capable graphics card drivers and some wireless drivers also fit into this category. Ubuntu should alert you that better drivers are available but it is possible to check manually. Click on the System menu, Administration and then Hardware Drivers. You can see in our screenshot below that there is an entry for our wireless card called ‘Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless Lan cards’. If you see this, left-click it once and then on the Activate button. You may need to enter your password before Ubuntu will download and install the drivers.