Getting wireless to work in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04 with atheros wireless card 5007EG - III

Getting WIFI Led to work:-
In this post, I'll describe on how to get the WIFI LED, if any on acer laptops to work. The ndiswrapper driver I used would normally not give a working LED or might be it would work with very low intensity.

The following method involves editing a file associated with the ndiswrapper driver installation and cannot be used for the madwifi installation. If I find any useful information on how to get the LED working in madwifi, I'll try posting that too.

First type the following command from command line and check for the output:-

xxxx@yyyyyy-laptop:~$ ndiswrapper -l
net5211 : driver installed
device (168C:001C) present (alternate driver: ath_pci)

here (168C:001C) means my device is listed under this sub-driver. Then you have to travel to /etc/ndiswrapper/net5211/ and check for the filename like 168C:001C.5.conf. Yours would be different as per the output of the "ndiswrapper -l" command.

Then open the above file as root from terminal by using the following command in case of ubuntu:

sudo gedit /etc/ndiswrapper/net5211/168C:001C.5.conf

and the following command in case of kubutu:

sudo kate /etc/ndiswrapper/net5211/168C:001C.5.conf

The file will look something like this:-

sys_files|ar5211.sys
NdisVersion|0x50001
Environment|1
class_guid|4d36e972-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318
driver_version|,07/25/2007,5.0.3.67
BusType|5
SlotNumber|01
NetCfgInstanceId|{28022A01-1234-5678-ABCDE-123813291A00}

..................
..........
DriverDesc|NDIS Network Adapter
................

The (........) only means that other lines might be present. Please don't go about adding ....... to your file.

After the "DriverDesc|NDIS Network Adapter" line add the following 2 lines:-

gpioPinFunc1|3
gpioLedCustom|4

If "gpioPinFunc1|3" is already present, then add the gpioLedCustom|4 line alone. In gpioLedCustom|X, the last X can be anything between 1 to 4, This only makes the LED blink at different rates when it is idle. When you connect to a network, it all changes to normal. Finally you need to unload and reload the driver to check the LED utility. This can be donw using the following commands:

sudo modprobe -r ndiswrapper
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Thereafter the LED should be working correctly.

In my next post, I'll discuss on getting your network to a higher level of security such as WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK than WEP. I'll try posting about this in a week or so.