Help me put wireless in my xubuntu

January 23, 2008 6:28 PM

How do I get my linksys wireless USB stick (model: wusb54gc) working with linux (xubuntu)?

I have no linux experience or knowledge and so I haven't found anything online yet that explains how to get my usb-plugin wireless adapter (wusb54gc) to work with xubuntu. I plugged it in and nothing happened. Does anyone have any advice?

The xubuntu machine doesn't have access to the internet (can't plug it in anywhere), but I do have a mac laptop and I can burn something to a cd if I need to download a driver.

posted by andoatnp to computers & internet (4 comments total)

This seems to be your best bet:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=516649&highlight=WUSB54GC
posted by oblio_one at 6:47 PM on January 23, 2008

I guess I should have mentioned that I'm using 7.10, and the guide seems to be about 7.4. Do you know if the instructions and the script will work with the later version of xubuntu?
posted by andoatnp at 6:53 PM on January 23, 2008

That guide has a script for 7.10, aka Gutsy.

A quick primer: There are two ways to get wireless working on Linux. You can use native drivers if they exist for your card, or you can use ndiswrapper.

Ndiswrapper is a clever way of using the card's Windows drivers. You must first install ndiswrapper, then you must find the Windows drivers and tell ndiswrapper about them, and then you must load ndiswrapper as a kernel module. These things are what the above-linked script claims to do (disclaimer: I only read the post, not the script), and it's probably worth trying if you don't want to get your hands dirty by mucking around in a shell.

However, there may be native drivers for wusb54gc (see here). Are you sure they're not working?

A couple of diagnostic steps you can take:

• Does iwconfig show a wireless card?
• What appears in the output of dmesg when you plug in the card?

Anyway, posting on ubuntuforums.org is going to get you better answers than ask.mefi. Good luck
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:11 PM on January 23, 2008

I've got the wireless barely working. After I connect to my network and enter my password it takes about two minutes for it to connect, and then it will only stay connected long enough to open a single web page. Then it crashes and the connection drops. and I start the whole process over. I'll try some more trouble shooting tomorrow, I guess.

Thanks for the help.
posted by andoatnp at 10:44 PM on January 23, 2008