New Linux/Ubuntu user: Problems with INTEL PRO/Wireless 3945ABG

Just installed linux for the first time. Have a dual boot with windows xp on my ASUS V6J laptop. I do not have the network working in ubuntu. How can I get my wireless network working, the card is listed in the topic?

 

If Ubuntu doesnt recognize it initially, then that means support for it isnt included in the standard kernel.

That means you would have to compile in the particular module into the kernel (not sure about your abilities since your new) or check if you can use the ndiswrapper software with your windows driver.

Best thing is to check the ubuntu forums for similar issues, as there might Ubuntu specific solutions.

 

http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/

 

Thanks, seems complex

 

Unfortunately, getting all your hardware working on the latest laptops can be fiddly... at least until the drivers are rolled into the various distros next release.

Perhaps someone in the Ubuntu community has packaged the ipw3945 driver already?

 

you could get ndiswrapper to work with . it would use windows drivers instead

 

What version of Ubuntu are you using? 5 or 6? 6 is just coming out or will be coming out very soon...

 

Is there much speculation (or knowledge I suppose, I don't think they would keep this a secret) on what all will be added to the new Ubuntu 6? I plan to try it, my two big things are getting wireless and sound to work on my V6j. Does anyone know?

 

Wireless is unlikely to work without recompilation in the upcoming version of Ubuntu. The driver for the new Intel chip uses a binary, closed-source user-space daemon, and it will not be merged into the standard kernel in that state. I think Ubuntu will follow that policy, as well. But it's really not so hard to compile the kernel, and there are plenty of other benefits.
Sound might be a different story, and might not be a kernel problem at all. It also might be better in the newer release.

 

I noticed after installing beta 2 of 6.06 dapper, that the wired network no longer works on my v6j. Am I incorrect in assuming that the network card should automatically be configured during install, so when I first run it, my wired network should work?

 

Did you reinstall? That wasn't necessary--Ubuntu has excellent facilities for upgrading built in. Yes, the network should work after an install. What's your network card?

 

Have a Realtek NIC RTL8168/8111
and an Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG cards

Got drivers for both from their websites, but following the install instructions, errors come up. 5 days of headaches with this =-(

The instructions for the wireless drivers are:

Instructions for installing my NIC drivers say to do the above. When I do this in terminal window in ubuntu dapper flight 7, I getmake: command not found.

What am I missing?

Instructions are as follows;
Building and Installation
=========================

To build a binary RPM* package of this driver, run 'rpmbuild -tb
<filename.tar.gz>'. Replace <filename.tar.gz> with the specific filename
of the driver.

NOTE: For the build to work properly, the currently running kernel MUST
match the version and configuration of the installed kernel sources.
If you have just recompiled the kernel reboot the system now.

RPM functionality has only been tested in Red Hat distributions.

1. Move the base driver tar file to the directory of your choice. For
example, use /home/username/e1000 or /usr/local/src/e1000.

2. Untar/unzip archive:

tar zxf e1000-x.x.x.tar.gz

3. Change to the driver src directory:

cd e1000-x.x.x/src/

4. Compile the driver module:

make install

The binary will be installed as:

/lib/modules/<KERNEL VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/e1000/e1000.[k]o

The install locations listed above are the default locations. They
might not be correct for certain Linux distributions. For more
information, see the ldistrib.txt file included in the driver tar.

 

My buddy told me i have nothing installed to compile stuff. sad that dapper doesnt have this installed default

 

For anyone using Dapper beta, if you do a update the 3945abg will now work. You no longer have to compile anything.

After reading about it on the Ubuntu forums, I did a update and my wireless now works

Now all I have to do is figure out my graphics drivers so I can start gaming.

 

Excellent news on the ipw3945 front... thanks for the update.

Regarding graphics drivers, I'll admit I haven't looked at Ubuntu for a while but aren't the nVidia drivers packaged already? I think they're part of the "restricted" section of the repository.

More info can be found here.

 

yeah, I kind of just figured that out. I was trying to compile drivers and do different types of voodoo to get the nvidia graphics drivers installed. I was doing stuff that was needed in 5.10 but not in dapper beta. Oh well, this helped me learn some stuff about how linux works

This is the first time I have tried a Linux install that actually worked. I downloaded the Dapper beta live cd out of boredom mostly - I didnt expect it to work very well on a newer laptop. The live cd was actually pretty impressive so I installed it onto the hard drive. Right now I actually like it better than my XP partition.

 

Well maybe, but not here on this Thinkpad T60p. I see that the module and the daemon are present, but loading the module complains about lots of missing symbols (yes, I loaded the ieee80211 module as well).

 

Update your installed kernel, and let the Ubuntu maintainer for the ipw3945 package know. Drivers are built around specific kernel versions.

 

Thanks, that was the hint I needed! My kernel was up to date but I was booting the wrong one. And that was because I've also got SuSE 10.1 installed and it is controlling the MBR. So I reconfigured SuSE's grub to chain to the Ubuntu grub rather than referencing the ubuntu kernel directly.

Now the wireless is working.

 

I can't make my Intel 3945ABG works, can anybody help me?

This is my kernel verson:

2.6.15-25-686

It is my first time in Linux...

And when I try to install the ieee...

ieee80211-1.1.14$ make install
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.15-25-686/build M=/home/chad/ieee80211-1.1.14 modules
make: *** /lib/modules/2.6.15-25-686/build: No such file or directory. Stop.
make: *** [modules] Error 2

Whats wrong?

Seems that the wireless conection is detected but can not connected...

How can I update the drivers?

Im trying to install this: intel-ipw3945-1.0.0, but I can't

Anybody help me plz...

 

A user here;

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1012477&postcount=167

seems to have sorted out manually installing the 3945 drivers in Ubuntu. Check out that or the entire thread at;

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=140085&highlight=ieee

However as others in the thread have pointed out it seems like the latest release of Ubuntu now has support for this built in. My recommendation would be to upgrade to the latest release first.

If you want to go the manual route, you can try the instructions previously noted. (Although if you're really into that you should probably just build everything from source via Gentoo.. <g>)

 

Do you use Ubuntu 6.06? It should work out of the box. Just install "linux-686-smp" or get the appropiate "linux-restricted-modules-xxx" package.

To build it manually:
First you have to run "make" without "install" to build the modules. "make install" will install them (superuser rights required). This has to be done for ieee80211 and ipw3945.

Regards
Aaron

PS: I see that there is a reply already, why didn't I see this... maybe it helps anyway.

 

If you can't use make (you get make: command not found), just type:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

in the terminal (you will need admin password)

And it installs (no internet required)

 

I've managed to get wpa working on my 9400 with a netgear router.

Under network load, the connection kept dropping quite consistently. FYI, redoing the ieee driver fixed the problem.

So in essence, all the bits and pieces you need to look at, are:

ipw3945.sourceforge.net
do ipw3945 and ieee using the instructions, also the firm ware thing
/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant something
/etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant something
/etc/modprobe.conf
/etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth0
modprobe ipw3945
(light starts flashing like mad)
service wpa_supplicant start
(light becomes solid after 5 seconds)
ifup eth1

Once it's working, you won't look back, but obviously, it's a pain in the @ss configuring it the first time.

Oh, I'm on FC5.

 

My problem lies in switching networks. At home i use WPA (calling wpa_supplicant) and at work i do not. I have 2 different /etc/network/interface files I keep, one for work and one for home. Every time I switch places I need to overwrite with the proper interfaces file and then reboot. Is there a easier way to get this to work?

After switching interface files simply doing an ifdown then ifup does not give me the connection. Seems like every time I need to reboot