Alright, people are always asking at OSU Opensource Club, “How do I get my wireless card working?” So instead of answering this question over and over, I decided to write this guide instead.

Step 1. Do I have a wireless card?

The first thing we have to figure out is whether Ubuntu knows about the wireless card. Unfortunately, some wireless companies refuse to tell the community how their cards work and don’t see the demand to write Linux drivers. In this case, people are working to reverse-engineer these wireless cards but it’s still very sketchy right now. If you have Intel Centrino, you’re in luck because these will almost certainly work without any added nonsense.

To see if your wireless card is recognized, we will run some commands in the Terminal. Of course, you can do almost all of this without it in Ubuntu, but it’s much easier to copy and paste text then to go through lots of dialogs. To start the terminal, go to Applications->Accessories->Terminal, and type iwconfig.

After running the command, you should get something similar to this:

If you see this, you should be good to go. If you only see “no wireless extensions” for every entry, your wireless card isn’t supported natively.

My wireless card isn’t here!

Fear not! Your wireless card can still work using a program called NDISWrapper. This allows you to use Windows wireless drivers in Linux. To get this to work:

1. In the terminal window you opened, run lspci -nn. Then look for the numbers highlighted in red here:
   

   05:02.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4318] (rev 02)

2. Go to the NDISWrapper Compatibility List and search the page for the ID, then download the driver. After unzipping, you should end up with (at least)two files, a .INF file and a .SYS file.
3. In the terminal run sudo apt-get install ndisgtk, then go to System->Administration->Windows Wireless Drivers. Install the Windows drivers by browsing to the .INF file
4. Try iwconfig again. If it doesn’t work, run sudo modprobe ndiswrapper in the terminal then try again. If it still doesn’t work, you may have to try another driver.

Install NetworkManager

Now that you have your wireless card working, let’s install a program to let us select wireless networks directly called NetworkManager. Run the command (in the terminal!) sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome, then reboot. You’ll be greeted by a new icon:

Congratulations! Your wireless should work with standard access points.

What about OSU Wireless?

Now, for OSU Wireless, you need to do a bit extra. Make sure to register to get your username (usually your OSU username + ‘w’, mine is “betts.62w”) and get your password. When you try to connect using Network Manager, you should get a dialog similar to this one:

Only fill in the two fields colored in red, NetworkManager sets the rest of the fields correctly by default. Some people report they don’t get this dialog when they try to connect to OSU Wireless; if this happens, make sure your NetworkManager is up to date (it should be >= version 0.6.3). It could also be that your native wireless driver isn’t finished, so try the NDISWrapper driver if you aren’t already using it.

Update: I was able to get the actual OSU Wireless dialog