64-Bit Wireless Atheros Using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

I finally got back to attempting to get the wireless capability working on my Toshiba A215-54747 64-bit Turion laptop equipped with Atheros wireless. The following instructions build on the shoulders of others whose recommendations were gleened from Ubuntu's own forums.

My value add will be to introduce as much clarity to the process as I can to what worked for me.

Prerequisites (silly as some may seem):

The Toshiba has a built-in toggle switch mid-way under the front edge of lighting that enables wireless. You can tell its activated when an orange LED is lit just under the edge of the front of the unit. Make sure its on.

You will need to have a wired internet connection to update the system and to download wireless application necessities. Connect your laptop until wireless installation is completed.

Many instructions talk about the Atheros Hardware access Layer (HAL) driver found under System->Hardware Drivers. It can be disabled or enabled. If enabled it will simply say Not in use after we're done.

Let's be sure that the system is up-to-date. Open up a command line terminal (application-> Accessories -> Terminal) and type:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

In that same Terminal window type: ifconfig

You will get a series of lines about network devices.

The important line we are looking for looks like: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn

The hexadecimal numbers in the nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn sequence are the MAC address for your wireless card. Write this down and put it to one side.

In the same terminal window type: pwd

This will show you your home directory - something like home/your_name

This is where we will move all our downloaded software.

Make sure your browser preferences send downloads to your desktop.

Now we will prevent the default driver from intercepting our desired driver. In the Terminal window type exactly:

echo "blacklist ath_pci" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Close your terminal window.

Download the following to your desktop (so we can see that we have the right stuff).

Open firefox and go to:

http://blakecmartin.googlepages.com/ar5007eg-64-0.2.tar.gz

You will be asked to save the file so do so.



Go to:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

Click on Downloads and download the latest stable version of the product.

Close your browser. You should now see two tar files on your desktop.

On the main Ubuntu menu click Places->Home which will open up your home directory. Drag and drop both tar files there.

Open another Terminal window. You will be in your home directory. We will now install the 64-bit wireless driver and the application.

Type exactly:

tar xvf ar5007eg-*.tar.gz

then:

tar xvf ndiswrapper-1.53.tar.gz

In both these commands the file names must match the file names of the tar files you downloaded.

Finally, type:

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

Install the wireless driver:

On the Ubuntu menu, click System->Administration->Windows Wireless Drivers

Her you will click Install New Driver and navigate to the ar5007eg-64-0.2/ar5007eg directory that holds the net5211.inf file. Click on the .inf file.

In the terminal type:

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Once in the file add the following line:

pre-up/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 hw ether nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn

where the nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn sequence is the MAC address you captured from your machine at the very beginning of these instructions. Save the file.

If you have difficulty saving the file go to the /etc/network directory and change the permissions on the interfaces file using chmod to let you write to the file.

Disconnect the hard wire internet connecton. Restart the system.

After the restart, on the Ubuntu menu, locate the internet connection micro-icon (a set of bars or repeating terminals) and set it to wireless.

This worked beautifully in my experience.

Ubuntu (64-bit) on a Toshiba A215-S4747 Laptop

It took me a while but I did it!

A quick explanation; I bought a Toshiba Laptop with the intention of running Ubuntu on it. It came loaded with Vista whatever on it and I tried unsuccessfully to dual-boot Ubuntu on the machine. I'm sure I paid a price for Vista and I expected when I was told by the salesperson that the machine was dual-bootable that the claim included Linux offerings.

What followed was an education in marketing. By attempting to partition the 200GB drive using Vista, I had no luck installing Ubuntu (I tried many versions). I used the Vista help which tells you dual-booting is for Windows systems only. All of which made me sweat. Nor could I find a way to get rid of Vista!

(Long and short) I called Toshiba who gave me zero help and are, largely a waste of time on the phone and on their web site.

The store, Best Buy, was belligerent and wanted money to get rid of Vista. Not a happening proposition.

So I tried friends (Julie Group) and Slashdot and finally, through discovery, and nights of experimentation, I am up and running.

Here's the skinny:

Getting rid of Vista

The only thing that worked for me came from Slashdot.
You can use an existing XP installation CD to repartition the drive away from Vista without violating your EULA. You do this by booting from the XP CD and repartitioning the drive by deleting Vista (Toshiba's come with a backup Vista CD).

Don't install XP!

Now you have a clean hard drive with nothing more than Toshiba's small partition showing.

Installing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty 64-bit:

My box is a Turion 64 x 2 Dual Core Mobile model so despite warnings of instability I chose to install the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.

Feisty will repartition your disk fine but at the very end of the installation the X-Windows fails. You will be confronted with a series of log file screens. After much experimentation I found out that you must click through all these to get to a command line prompt.

Again, after much experimentation, this is what works; at the command line type: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org . This will result in a series of questions.

Accepting most defaults will work fine. Two important exceptions are that your driver must be vesa and your screen resolution must be 1200 x 800 (chosen using the spacebar).

At the end of this you will return to a command prompt and type, startx . This will begin the installation of Ubuntu onto the drive. Once installed, reboot without the Ubuntu installation disk.

Important post-installation processing:

When Ubuntu boots from the hard drive, two alerts will scream at you. One is that updates are available and the second is that the screen driver is not working.

IGNORE THE SCREEN DRIVER ALERT! Activating it hoses the system and results in a black screen of death.

Instead, install all updates and reboot. The screen driver resolves itself automatically.

IT JUST WORKS!

The screen looks great. The sound works. Internet connectivity required a hard-wire to the modem. Installing the wireless is a separate issue.

Conversion to Ubuntu

I'm a bit behind in the blog because I'm eating my own dogfood. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative is about to bust loose this year. Asus is releasing a low-cost, suped-up OLPC model that is going to start a tidal wave of activity. It is being sold at a $350 price point for a higher end model. I'll being talking a lot more about the revolutionary technologies this initiative is going to produce.

But more to the point I needed a laptop for work (my work needs are slightly more rigorous than the OLPC baseline) and I've been putting it off. Sunday a very tempting ad got me stoked to finally make a purchase but when I got to the store the sales-guy told me to reconsider the brand - the store was getting lots of returned merchandise related to it. So I shelled out an extra fifty and picked up a Toshiba that I'm right now converting from whatever Microsoft thing is on it to Ubuntu. Total cost for an industrial strength laptop these days ($600 ~ $700); within a month, a student worthy laptop will be $250 - $500 - every American student should be issued a new one every four grades or so. There's no excuse (and I mean none) that kids in Africa and South America will be computing while our students are held hostage to blackboard lectures. Schools need to budget for and instrument our teachers and classrooms with this stuff.

As for my progress - so far - so good. More later.

Back To School Shopping for Computers

It's that time of year again and this summer I'm recommending that parents, teachers, and schools give the Linux Ubuntu operating systems serious consideration.

For the past six months or so I have been eating my own dog food so to speak and I am so pleased and impressed with Ubuntu that I believe it makes the most sense as a student operating system for a number of reasons. I know from using it myself that Ubuntu is the real deal - a desktop Linux as good and better than the competition.

Dell now sells Ubuntu machines preinstalled. Walmart offers Linspire another fine distribution and other vendors are following suit.

Second, Open Office is both free and just as powerful and easily learned as any other Office suite on the market. Schools use the argument that commercial packages only cost the school $40 per seat but what they forget is that these packages cost parents $100s of dollars at home. This cost affects teachers as well. For families under finacial constraints this is a back-breaking expense.

I have found Ubuntu's Desktop better than commercial products and the number of free applications is astounding. Kids can freely experiment in art, science, math, and just about anything one can imagine without regard to cost.

And wise parents will invest in a $400 range laptop for high school students. The portability is well worth the money and the quality of these machines is more than adequate IMO.

And don't forget an inexpensive copy of "The Ubuntu Book" - an indispensible manual telling users how it all works.