Thursday, May 29, 2008

D-Link DWA-110 Wireless G USB Adapter: A Nightmare with Ubuntu

Yes, I bought the D-Link DWA-110 Wireless G USB Adapter and with it I got myself a nightmare - free of charge - when I attempted to get it working with a freshly installed Ubuntu Hardy.

First of all, the driver rt73usb that comes with Ubuntu 8.04 did not work out of the box. A quick browse at the manufacturer site lead me to a driver meant for Linux. Naturally this option would be the preferred one. After all the driver is coming from the maker of the device. Boy, I was totally wrong. Compilation went okay, but I couldn't configure the adapter.

Frustrated, I search for anoother option and I found one - ndiswrapper using the MS Windows driver. It didn't sound like a good solution to me (and it is still not a good one now!). Why would I want to use MS Windows driver? I'm running Linux, for goodness sake! I tried anyway, and as I expected it didn't work.

Another round of researching lead me to a GPL'd driver which in multiple instance reported to work with the exact USB adapter that I have. As a bonus, there's even a guide to the driver running on Ubuntu. Finally, using the open source driver and manual, I managed to get my USB network adapter working. Kudos to all involved with the GPL'd driver and those who contribute to the manual.

1 comment:

artfwo said...

Quite a useful guide, thanks for sharing!