I've just done a fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04 on a Dell Inspiron laptop. I popped into PC World and grabbed the simplest cheapest wireless network card off the shelf (a Belkin Wireless G+ Notebook Card), tried installing it, only to find it wasn't recognised by Ubuntu. Some googling showed me lists of pages talking about adding modules to blacklists, downloading the latest ndiswrapper packages and building them and compiling kernels, etc.
If this was 10 years ago I'd totally be up for that, happy to roll up my sleeves and dive into the terminal, crawling through lines of config files etc. But come on, this is 2007 - I should just be able to plug the card in and start working.
Now here's the happy part of the story. I fired up the Synaptic Package Manager, did a search for 'ndiswrapper', and installed ndiswrapper-common, ndisgtk, ndiswrapper-utils-1.9. I then ran the "Windows Wireless Drivers" program under the System, Administration menu, pointed it at /cdrom/FILES/DRIVERS/bcmwl5.inf, plugged the card in and it just worked.
So, if you're trying to get a Belkin Wireless G+ Notebook Card (F5D7011 or F5D7011uk) working on Ubuntu, ignore all the lengthy articles and forum posts. Stick with the GUI (of course, you need to know what packages to install though...)
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Posted by savs at August 17, 2007 9:13 PMJust be glad you weren't trying to get it running in a Mac ;-)
Posted by: Adrian Bool at August 18, 2007 9:12 AM