Setting up Wifi on Thinkpad T22 using 2Wire 802.11g PC card on Ubuntu 6.10

Posted by Siddique on May 9, 2007 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

As the old saying “If necessity is the mother of all invention, the frustration is the father of all”. In my case, necessity and frustration is the motivation behind this article. There are two things which I have struggled while setting up Ubuntu 6.10 on my Thinkpad T22 laptop. The first and most frustrating thing is setting up wifi using 2Wire 802.11g PC Card and it is the subject of this article. This should apply to any laptop, using 2Wire PC card or PC Cards belonging to the same chipset (Intersil ISL3886). The second thing is the intermittent blank screen (freezing issue) while boot up with Thinkpad T22 after installing Ubuntu 6.10. I am going to cover that in my next article.

Before going on to the actual How-to’s and instructions, let me give a brief history on where I was, before getting here. As you might know, Think T22 model is more than 4 years old and some of the current tools & softwares I work with, doesn’t run on this laptop. For the cost of upgrading this laptop, I might as well go for a new laptop. So, I planned on making this laptop a linux workstation. Initially, I installed Kubuntu 6.06 and played around a bit, everything worked perfectly fine expect the wireless access. I tried KNetworkManager,Wifi radar and every other tool I can get, to make this laptop wifi enabled. Instead of making it to work, I ended up getting more and more frustrated. I posted my questions in linux forums, talked to linux experts, but, nothing seem to work. I struggled on & off for almost 6 months before making this happen.

After getting lost in the twilight zone, struggling to get my wireless card to work, I decided to take a step back and start everything from the scratch. I planned to install Ubuntu 6.10, which was a stable release at that time. Incase, if you haven’t installed Ubuntu on your PC or laptop, believe me it’s a no-brainer. Even if you are a hardcore Windows user, it’s almost as easy as installing Windows XP or Vista. Burn the installation CD, boot it and follow the prompts, Ubuntu will install as easy as 1, 2 & 3

Alright, enough of stories, lets get down to the meat of this article. For some reason, the pre-bundled Ubuntu 6.10 PCI drivers that was getting loaded for 2Wire 802.11g card doesn’t work properly. So, we need to install Windows native driver available for 2Wire 802.11g on Ubuntu using NDiswrapper. Before following the steps described below, make sure you have a wired internet connection, because, we need to download some additional software packages from web. Here are the steps…

Disable the currently loaded wrong drivers for the PC Card by blacklisting them

		sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Add the following lines in the end

		# blacklist the wrongly loaded drivers for 2Wire 802.11g wireless PC Card
		blacklist islsm
		blacklist islsm_pci
		blacklist islsm_device
		blacklist prism54

Install NDiswrapper 1.42 by building it yourself

Note: I did “sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper”, for some reason, it was not installing properly.

Inorder to compile the packages from source, make sure you have all the necessary development tools (i.e. libraries, compilers, headers).
```
		sudo aptitude install build-essential
		sudo aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r`
	
```
```
		Download NDiswrapper 1.42  tar
		tar -zxvf ndiswrapper-1.42.tar.gz
		cd ndiswrapper-1.42
		sudo make install
	
```
Note: Incase, if you messed something in the above step, don’t worry, you can uninstall and re-install it again as explained in NDiswrapper instructions

Install windows driver

Note: The downloaded driver from 2Wire’s website didn’t work for me. So, I have to download it from Fujitsu Siemens

		#Goto the folder, wherever you extracted the driver zip file
		sudo ndiswrapper -i prismA00.inf (this is the windows .inf driver information file)
		sudo ndiswrapper -l (shows if the driver is installed properly)
		sudo modprobe ndiswrapper (make sure if ndiswrapper is loading properly)
		sudo ndiswrapper -m (add entry for ndiswrapper in /etc/modprobe.d/)

		#For some strange reasons, NDiswrapper was not automatically loading for me during start-up. So, I had to add it to /etc/rc.local.
		sudo gedit /etc/rc.local
		#before the line "exit 0", add the following line
		modprobe ndiswrapper

Install Network Manager applet
```
sudo apt-get install networkmanager
```
Restart the machine

If all of the above steps went well, you should be able to see an icon on the top right. If you right click on it, you should be able to see the list of wireless lan within the range. Incase, if you are installing network manager for the first time, you might need to create a password keyring. This is a password for network manager applet, not a passphrase for your wireless network.

After all the struggle I went through, I could really feel the moment of satisfaction. It was such a relief and really worth it. I do feel, I mastered linux more than I knew before. And now, the IntelliJ 6.0.5 running on my Thinkpad T22(Ubuntu 6.10) is performing much better than my new Thinkpad T44 (Windows XP)