Install Wireless Driver

  • December 10, 2008 – 7:11 pm
  • Posted in writeups

These tips courtesy of Veit Wahlich and the Ubuntu Community Documentation.
To enable wireless, if you are using Ubuntu you must first blacklist the (wrong) driver Ubuntu chose at installation:

sudo su
echo "blacklist ath_pci" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
echo "blacklist ath_hal" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
exit

Now for both Fedora and Ubuntu, download the latest development driver here (tested on compat-wireless-2009-01-06.tar.bz2).
Keeping in mind that the install line will takes a while, run:

tar -jxf compat-wireless*.bz2
cd compat-wireless*
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo make load

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

17 Comments

  1. [Ed.: repeat the process. must be done for every kernel update. @carneades]

    I followed these instructions, and it blew away my working driver. (Tainted modules, and all.) However, when I went back and added “sudo make” before “sudo make install”, it worked fine. Looking forward to testing the speed difference…

    • tim
    • Posted December 14, 2008 at 3:51 pm
    • Permalink

    awesome thanks! this really helped me get my nc10 online!

    • haroldthebarrel
    • Posted December 18, 2008 at 3:20 pm
    • Permalink

    I was able to get wifi working smoothly pretty easily using this write-up. Thanks for the help!

  4. I noticed when I upgraded the kernel the wireless took a crap. I did the tutorial again and all set.

    • Jon Carson
    • Posted January 6, 2009 at 11:02 am
    • Permalink

    [Ed.: I am unable to confirm this problem. I updated today to compat-wireless-2009-01-06.tar.bz2 without event. Try redownloading the file and/or posting your terminal session as a comment. @carneades]

    I tried downloading the two drivers dated Jan. 6, 2009, and received an error stating that they were not bzip2 files. Any ideas?

    • Jon Carson
    • Posted January 6, 2009 at 2:03 pm
    • Permalink

    I did as you suggested, and all is well. I redownloaded and had no problems. Still in the midst of install…

  7. Hi!

    Nice Blog! Happy to keep following this!

    http://bmqqlkmh.darktech.org

    • raj
    • Posted January 14, 2009 at 7:33 pm
    • Permalink

    The instructions worked a treat! Thank you so much. Can now go to bed, having restored wireless on my NC10

    • Dezy Wilks
    • Posted January 21, 2009 at 6:18 am
    • Permalink

    I did the above and it worked but was very slow, after allot of retries and trying to ind a solution I noticed the output from ipv6 was odd to say the least !

    So if your having the same problem as me ..

    Globally disable ipv6 by doing the following.

    [quote]lsmod | grep ipv6
    ipv6 265856 10
    [/quote]

    @ terminal type
    [quote]
    dezy@Ubuntu-netbook:~$ sudo echo “blacklist ipv6″ > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ipv6 [/quote]

    you will need to restart
    [quote]sudo reboot[/quote]

    and to just check it is disabled
    [quote]
    dezy@Ubuntu-netbook:~$ lsmod | grep ipv6[/quote]

    • Erik
    • Posted January 28, 2009 at 8:21 pm
    • Permalink

    This worked great. Then, my update manager installed the xxx-11 kernel, instead of xxx-9 (I don’t know what ‘xxx’ is). Now, no wireless networks show up, any ideas? I could repeat the process, but don’t want to do this every time a new kernel version is installed.

    • hot22shot
    • Posted February 3, 2009 at 4:09 am
    • Permalink

    Thanks for this. Do you think it could work on debian ?

    • hot22shot
    • Posted February 4, 2009 at 9:31 am
    • Permalink

    Well, it worked, tested on compat-wireless-old-2009-02-04.tar.bz2.

    • Pat Tobin
    • Posted February 21, 2009 at 10:59 am
    • Permalink

    I tried that install too. I used file compat-wireless-2009-02-20.tar.bz2, however this has failed to work for me. I would try the file as given in the post above, but it does not seem now to be available. Any Suggestions?

    • Loomnie
    • Posted February 28, 2009 at 12:13 pm
    • Permalink

    Same thing that happened to Spike happened to me. I ran the commands and it blew out my driver. Now I am trying to run it by first running sudo make before running sudo make install. Thanks for this though. And thanks to Spike too…

    • Pat Tobin
    • Posted March 3, 2009 at 6:22 am
    • Permalink

    Thanks Loomnie for that suggestion. Tried it and worked. I now have a wireless connection working perfectly. Followed the rest of the instructions at the top. Just included make before make install.

    I had previously untarred the tar-ball onto my Desktop, made and installed it from there. I untarred it again into a different directory and made a fresh installation from there, installing it from the fresh make.

    Thanks very much.

    • dan
    • Posted May 15, 2009 at 10:39 am
    • Permalink

    Hi I did all the above but my wireless still did not work… WhenI clicked the link there were several files there I downloaded the compat-wireless-2009-05-14.tar.bz2. Can anyone advise am I suppose to download all the files? I am new to this Ubuntu

    • Nicolas Buduroi
    • Posted July 21, 2009 at 6:15 pm
    • Permalink

    Well, it seems everybody got it working but me! Trying these instruction on Debian Lenny with the 2009-07-22 version of wireless driver and all I got was my system complaining about a missing ‘build’ directory in /lib/modules/…


2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. By Chris weBlog » Blog Archive » Samsung Netbook NC10 on 18 Dec 2008 at 4:00 pm

    [...] wireless drivers Ubuntu selected by default for the NC10 are not correct.  So I visited this blog, followed the instructions to compile the correct drivers, and it worked.  No sweat. Easy [...]

  2. By TheMorningFlight.com » My NC10 Lost Wireless in Ubuntu on 31 Jan 2009 at 5:14 pm

    [...] Eventually I got help from here. [...]