Hi, this is a guide I decided to write after buying and installing a Linksys WUSB54GC wireless USB adapter. The guide is very simple.
What you need to get this device going is to install ndiswrapper and the driver. You can use the driver attached to this post (or you can go to Linksys official web-site, download the driver (not the Vista one), unpack it (I know that it is an EXE file, but you can still unpack it) and find the drivers in the Drivers folder – that’s exactly how I got the drivers I attached to this post).
Ok, now the installation procedure. Lets assume you unpacked the drivers into your home directory (~) – the should be three files:
- rt73.cat
- rt73.inf
- rt73.sys
1. Install ndiswrapper:
apt-get install ndiswrapper
2. Change the dir to where your driver files are located:
cd ~
3. Install the drivers:
ndiswrapper -i rt73.inf
ndiswrapper -m
ndiswrapper -mi
ndiswrapper -ma
4. Reboot. Now the device should start working – you can verify that by clicking on the nmapplet or by going to Administration->Network – it should be there and it should show you wireless networks. I got it working that way and it correctly shows the signal strength, connects nicely – works nicely.
Now, why I used ndiswrapper – before I installed and configured ndiswrapper the device was also present and it even showed me the wireless networks, but it did not connect to any network.
November 20, 2007 at 4:15 am |
I am trying to follow the above directions however for 7.10 Ubuntu but it isn’t working. Can you perhaps send me totally detailed instructions on the process thanks.
November 26, 2007 at 10:18 pm |
works it on ubuntu 7.10 too?
December 7, 2007 at 12:57 pm |
Hmm… Didnät try that on Ubuntu 7.10, but I think it should work (95% sure that it works).
December 30, 2007 at 8:47 pm |
I tried that on 7.10 and it does
December 31, 2007 at 9:29 am |
Ok, thanks, mate. I added 7.10 to the title of this post.
January 6, 2008 at 8:12 am |
Anyone know if it works on 6.06 lts?
April 3, 2008 at 11:45 pm |
don’t you have to blacklist the old ubuntu drivers so they don’t get loaded? I’m a little new to ubuntu, but I read that in a few other guides about this adapter
April 4, 2008 at 12:54 am |
an update: it seems to be working. after using your guide I had to reboot, uninstall the driver, reboot, reinstall the driver, reboot again, and “create new wireless network”. the new driver says the connection is ~17% weaker, but I’m getting my full 850k down now instead of being capped at 100.
seems to me that linux in general needs more standardization when it comes down to hardware/software interfacing. I don’t quite understand the need for packages. a little proprietary if you ask me. RPM and DEB should just be one format, since linux is just linux. I figure if devs worked more on auto-building source code than relying on packages and repositories, the linux community could unify and contend a little better with windows and their EXE format. not to mention making errors a little more consistent and easier to troubleshoot.
I will state that while I can’t even boot into an rpm-based distro on this pc, ubuntu runs “perfectly” (gives me some irq error at boot that doesn’t seem to affect anything). weird.. but for a free os that looks better than a $400 os, I can’t complain too much.
April 11, 2008 at 7:41 am |
i do not know what you did wrong – you usually do not even need to restart to make those work. everything works without any problems. anyway, glad you got it working eventually.
April 24, 2008 at 11:41 pm |
And works it on ubuntu 8.04 ?? I think, it should, what do you think?
May 20, 2008 at 11:11 pm |
Jefim,
I used this procedure to get it working on Ubuntu 8.04. The only differences were that:
- I used the drivers off the CD which came with the device.
- “apt-get install ndiswrapper” didn’t work. It seems that the package has been split into two parts. Instead, I installed ndisgtk and that caused ndiswrapper* to be downloaded & installed as dependencies automatically.
Thanks a lot for showing the direction!
Abhik.
May 22, 2008 at 7:02 am |
Always glad to help B)
August 3, 2008 at 12:08 am |
Thanks !
October 12, 2008 at 5:22 am |
I can’t figure out how to unpack the .exe file. Can you give me a clue?
atool doesn’t seem to work
October 20, 2008 at 1:38 pm |
Try using WinRAR – it unpacks the exe with no problems
Just right-click and “Extract here”
October 25, 2008 at 7:41 pm |
In step #3:
ndiswrapper -m
ndiswrapper -mi
ndiswrapper -ma
Comment:
Don’t do all three of those. Each one of those will write different things in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper. The last two completely overwrite /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper effectively removing anything already there. The first one will still write its line in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper if either of the other two have ready been run, but error messages will be produced recommending removal of the other lines. Do one, try connecting, and if it works then stop.
November 26, 2008 at 8:25 am |
ok so i installed ndiswrapper off the cd and got the drivers extracted and i used the sudo ndiswrapper -i “name of driver” command in the terminal but its still not working and i cant get the wireless network drivers menu to come up or find it. do u think you could help me out???
November 28, 2008 at 11:55 am |
Hey, did you actually do the “ndiswrapper -m” part? Reboot? Any errors or strange output (e.g. from ndiswrapper -i).
April 12, 2009 at 9:11 am |
Hey, I really want to get the Drivers but when I click the link at the top called “Drivers for WUSB54GC” it is only a jpeg file? I can’t find the drivers at the official site either?
April 23, 2009 at 12:52 am |
Sam, the file is a jpeg file only because WordPress does not allow a lot of file extensions here. So I had to rename the file into *.jpg. Do not worry – it is an archive (not an image) and will unpack w/o problems.