I just finished installing Ubuntu on my laptop the other day, and started playing around with it. All is good except one thing. Wifi support. I use at the moment a 2wire 802.11g Wifi Card. The card has the Intersil chipset (ISL3886 I believe), and shows up under the network administration panel. The thing I don't get is that when I went to go configure and activate it, there was no WPA support, though from what I have read, 6.06 has it already. When doing an "iwconfig", the wifi card says it is an 802.11b card. Can anyone help with this?

You need specific drivers, and probably wpa-supplicant as well. That's about the limit of my knowledge about it, since I've only nstalled Ubuntu on two laptops, but it's probably a good place for you to start.

KLind of off topic, but how do you like Ubuntu? My mom says that i can make our drive a dual boot since we are going to reinstall windows anyways, do you think it is worth it?

Kerm, WPA supplicant is already installed, I checked, and according to the ubuntu docs, it is supposed to work right off the bat, but I may be wrong.

Harq, it is good, I recommend doing as a live CD first (it is in the same disk as the desktop installer)

I jsut finished dling the iso image, and now i m gonna burn it. Doesn't this have the live on it too? I will check...

P.S. My local comp store has cd's but i m not sure that theya re the latest release of Ubuntu.

If you downloaded the desktop version of 6.06 (Dapper Drake), it has the live CD build into it. If you have the ability to burn, being you have it downloaded, just go that route.

I am using Nero to burn the ISO file now... (I made sure to burn as a cd image). So I will try that in a few minutes.

Ah, yes, I am assuming it is using ndiswrapper for this, no? As you can see, ndiswrapper is far from perfect. WPA support via ndiswrapper is hit or miss, it would seem. Also, are you sure your CARD supports WPA and not just WEP? HOWEVER, linux drivers support is stageringly good recently, as RealTek (one of the larger makers of wireless chips) has GNU GPL'd all (or most) of their wifi drivers for linux. So first thing, check to see if there isn't already a native driver. If there isn't, check the ndiswrapper list and see if you are using the right windows driver for it.

You might just have to make the sacrifice of not having WiFi G speed (which, if you are just using it for the internet, isn't really a big deal) and only getting WEP encryption...

ok, first of all, I plugged in the card, and it was "recognized".

second, I also boot into Windows with this laptop, and everything is just fine, including WPA on the same card.

At a command prompt, type "ndiswrapper -l" (or if that gives you a not-found error, try "sudo ndiswrapper -l"). If you see one that says "hardware found" - then its using ndiswrapper (oh, those are lowercase L's, not capital i's)

ndiswrapper: command not found

btw, this appears with and without sudo

Hm..odd. I'd check the ubuntu wiki for tips on setting up wifi with WPA, and I'd also search the forums for people with your card and/or chipset. Maybe something there will tip you off as to how to get it running correctly.

well, first of all, I never installed ndiswrapper (I don't know if that would afect much really). Second, I have tried the forums, but they just confuse me.

Ubuntu now installs ndiswrapper by default, if I remember correctly. I haven't used the newest version of it, but I am fairly certain I remember seeing that.

Oh, and iwconfig (which is part of the wireless-tools package) doesn't support WPA, you have to use wpa_supplicant, I found that out while setting up my own wireless today. Check the ubuntu docs for setting up wpa_supplicant for a wireless connection.

EDIT: as for the wireless-g speed, try doing this "sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M" (replace wlan0 with whatever your wireless network adapter is named)

Hah, I had a feeling that wpa_supplicant was necessary; one of my friends for whom I installed Ubuntu had some problems with Ubuntu until we disabled the native support and used the supplicant in its place.

wpa-supplicant is installed by default, not ndiswrapper.

Meh, that's true. Oh well, w/e, I hope this works out for you in the end.

one can only hope, maybe I will figure it out soon though.

Those are two different things entirely. And how are you trying to configure the wireless? You mentioned earier using iwconfig. Iwconfig does NOT support WPA, as it is NOT wpa_supplicant. I have not used wpa_supplicant myself, so I am uncertain how to configure a wireless card with it, but I do know that wpa_supplicant has its own drivers, and its own configuration method.

ok, all I used iwconfig to do was tell me about the cards I had, no configuring with them. I was trying to do as the Ubuntu site said and use the network manager.