BT customers are provided with this USB WiFi adapter device to use in conjunction with wireless hardware that may be supplied as part of their Internet package. This hardware does not appear work out of the box in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) or Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), and needs a bit of work in order to get working. These instructions were adapted from a forum post at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=367448, and have been tested to work on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron).

Prerequisites

With Internet Access

The BT Home Hub comes with an Ethernet cable which allows you to connect directly to the Internet using the cable. If you can't connect to the Internet at all, read how to get the files without Internet access.

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper

Without Internet Access

It's a little bit harder without Internet access, so you'll need to use some form of removable media to transfer the files between computer.

Instructions

1) To start off we need to edit the file /etc/udev/rules.d/99-custom.rules to make up for a power issue with USB devices. You can do this in gedit by running in the terminal:

gksu gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/99-custom.rules

2) Then add this line into a single line in the file, then save and close it.

BUS=="usb",SYSFS{idProduct}=="0715",SYSFS{idVendor }=="1690",Run+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 1 > /sys/$devpath/device/bConfigurationValue'"

3) Run this command from the terminal, which refreshes the system with the changes made in that file:

sudo udevcontrol reload_rules

4) Now run these commands in the terminal to install the drivers with ndiswrapper.

sudo ndiswrapper -i Desktop/bcmrndis.inf
sudo cp Desktop/*.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmrndis
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

5) Reinsert the dongle, and click on the networking icon on the top panel. After a few seconds you should see a list of wireless networks. The dongle should be recognized and working.

6) You may find that the dongle isn't recognised when you reboot your computer. This may be because the ndiswrapper kernel module isn't loaded when the computer is booted. To test this, type "sudo modprobe ndiswrapper" into the terminal and you should be able to access the list of networks from the networking icon.

So you don't have to do this every time you reboot, simply add ndiswrapper into the list of boot-time kernel modules. Do this by opening terminal and running:

gksu gedit /etc/modules

Add the word "ndiswrapper" without quotes to the bottom line of the file, and save.

Notes

Credits

Thanks to the users who contributed to the forum post that this article was adapted to.


CategoryHardware

WifiDocs/Device/BT_Voyager_1055 (last edited 2008-09-15 22:25:35 by host86-157-4-39)