Installing wireless in Ubuntu

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wtburnette

2[H]4U
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Jun 24, 2004
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I wanted to test out Ubuntu on my new netbook, so I installed it with Wubi. Everything seems to work great, except the wireless. It seems that Aheros wireless isn't compatible? At least it's not on the compatibility list from what I can tell. Would it be better to use a netbook remix distro, or is there a way to install these drivers on the distro I have. BTW the version I have is 9.10 I believe.
 
Ubuntu 10.04 will be released later today, with more hardware support and far better performance than 9.10 ever offered. Suggestion:

Wait till 10.04 is official (they found a last minute bug - literally - with the GRUB bootloader and are holding up on the release for some period of hours), grab the ISO (try the x86 version first, 32 bit, and if the hardware works fine, go back and grab the x64 ISO later on).

After that, get Unetbootin which can put the entire ISO contents onto a USB stick (needs to be 1GB) and then you can play around with it and never even need to install anything on the hard drive.

Wubi is ok but, the USB stick is usually a bit better for just playing around, but the choice is yours.

But definitely wait to get Ubuntu 10.04 later today, it's pretty awesome compared to all the previous versions. The new look is pretty nice, actually, and a refreshing change from that craptastic orange/brown thing that should have been retired a long long time ago.
 
Sounds like a great plan to me. I'll do just what you've suggested. Ironically, I've just found a couple good live USB creators and ordered a couple of new flash drives to use with a couple different distros, so this should work out well... :D

Oh, but what if my wireless is still unsupported? Any of you linux gurus know how I can get a driver added, like with the ndiswrapper or something?
 
I am actually very surprised that your wireless card isn't supported under Ubuntu 9.10. But honestly if it just doesn't work on 9.10, you should download and install 10.4 from http://www.ubuntu.com/. I show it still hasn't been released.

The only good thing I really like about Ubuntu is their community. I really suggest you ask on their forums for help. They have seen / resolved it all. I am not saying nobody here can help, just that they're super helpful under Ubuntu and have helped thousands of people out with random issues like your wireless card.

http://ubuntuforums.org/
 
Thanks for that suggestion as well. If the eeebuntu I'm downloading isn't any assistance, I'll go ahead and pull down 10.4 and/or post in the forums for assistance. ;)
 
Well, I've tried Ubuntu 10.4, eeebuntu 4 beta, eeebuntu 3 and linux mint 8 and none seem to have drivers for my wireless. This is very disheartening. I guess I'll hit the ubuntu forums to see if I can find any answers there...
 
OK good luck. Just a side note that Arch Linux has very very nice netbook / notebook support. It doesn't have a graphical installer and is a bit more complex than Ubuntu but once she is running...it's an amazing distribution in my opinion!
 
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