Darren's CCIE mission

Okay so it’s taken a while to get this working, but it finally is! If you need to get an Abit AirPace Wi-Fi card working in 64-bit Ubuntu server (with no gui tools) this is how you do it.

First you need to install ndiswrapper:

sudo aptitude install ndiswrapper-utils
sudo aptitude install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
sudo aptitude install ndisgtk

Now you need to download the actual 64-bit driver. As there is no official one I’ve used this one: ar5007eg-64-0.2.tar.gz

Extract the drivers to a folder that won’t get deleted. I’ve put mine in /etc/wireless_driver
Now install the driver:

sudo ndiswrapper -i net5211.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m

If you do a sudo iwconfig you should see the interface now listed.
Now you need to install the following tools:

sudo aptitude install wireless-tools
sudo aptitude install wpasupplicant

The next step will be to associate the card with your AP. I’m using WPA2 on mine so this is how I did mine. The first thing you need to do is get your SSID password converted into hex.

 sudo wpa_passphrase "SSID" "Passphrase"

Substitute SSID and Passphrase for your actual SSID and password (Ignore the inverted commas themselves). The output will give you a long hex password like so:

psk=blahblahblahwhatever

save this password as you’ll need it in just a bit. N.B. Try not to have a SSID with spaces or a password with special characters. If you do then enter the password with a break character first. The backslash is the break character. This will need to be placed in front of every special character you have when entering your password

Edit your interfaces startup file like so:

 sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

This is my config, you’ll need to change the SSID and Passphrase to your own

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

#The wireless interface
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "SSID"
wpa-ap-scan 1
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk "Passphrase we created earlier"

Now we just need to restart the network and everything should be ok:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

You should see the interface in both ifconfig and iwconfig