HOWTO: Linksys WMP54G PCI Wireless Adapter on Ubuntu (Gutsy)

Published on October 19, 2007 in Hardware, How To's by Rami Taibah

Update: This guide is a bit outdated. Proceed at your own risk. It however should work, as it stood the test of time as evident by the comments.

I have a Dell sitting in my living room with a Linksys WMP54G PCI wireless adapter installed. The adapter worked just fine under Feisty (well TBH I never got the triangular bars icon of wireless connections but the two terminals of wired connections, but do I care??). Anyways I did an upgrade to Gutsy on the 17th, just 1 day shy of its official release, by invoking a ‘gksu ‘update-manager -c’, and to my horror the adapter stopped working!! No Internet connection for me.

I am not sure if this card is not supported under Gutsy, or just something went awry during the upgrade process (will try a Gutsy live CD later), but i tried using the “Windows Wireless Driver” function but to no avail.

Anyways, this is how I managed to get my WMP54G to work under Gutsy:

1-First of all grab the driver from here (XP not Vista)

2-Extract the .exe file using any archive manager and place on your desktop (or where ever you wish)

3-Go to the ndiswrapper homepage, and download the latest release (1.48 to date).

4-Next we will have to install ndiswrapper, so fire up a terminal and navigate to the folder where you downloaded ndiswrapper.

tar zxvf ndiswrapper-version.tar.gz
sudo make uninstall
sudo make
sudo make install

5- If everything went as planned, you should have ndiswrapper installed now, next we will need to install the driver. Assuming that the downloaded driver from step 1 is on your desktop:

ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/WMP54Gversion/Drivers/WMP54G/Rt2500.INF

6-Finally you will have to load the ndiswrapper module.

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

6-In my case this didn’t really work, which probably explains why using the “Windows Wireless Driver” function didn’t work in the first place. So here is the tricky part, apparently Gutsy already loaded my card’s module and is conflicting with the new installed driver. So we will have to remove the modules using rmmod.

sudo rmmod rt2500pci rt2x00pci rt2x00lib

Thats it! Perhaps you would have to unload ndiswrapper using rmmod and reload it again though.

8-Finally, you will probably need to cement this in order not to do this everytime you restart, so you will have blacklist the three modules we removed.

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

And add these lines:

blacklist rt2500pci
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00lib

Also add the ndiswrapper in /etc/modules to automatically load it when booting

sudo nano /etc/modules

And add:

ndiswrapper

Happy tweaking!!

About Rami Taibah

Rami Taibah the founder of The Linuxologist and a self proclaimed geek and Linux aficionado. This fall, he will be pursuing an MIMS degree at UC Berkeley, California. You can follow him on Twitter @rtaibah.