Ubuntu Update to Kernel 2.6.12-10 Wireless Work-around

If you use a wireless connection and use Ubuntu 5.10, you may need to work-around this morning's updates. Among the updates was a kernel refresh from 2.6.12-9 to 10. It broke two of my machines in that they didn't recognize my wireless devices. Here's what I did to put them back to work.

To make sure no one spilled coffee on my machines, I booted into the earlier kernel. The system came up fine and the wireless cards were active and connected. So, I felt confident I needed to get compatible modules.

After the update, you will find that the new kernel listed in GRUB is 2.6.12-10-386. The modules you have may not work with this kernel. So, consider using Synaptic Package Manager and download the more advanced version of the kernel for your machine.

For example, I download 2.6.12-10-686 on one machine and 2.6.12-10-k7 on the other. I also download the headers for those kernels. In Synaptic these packages are called linux-image and linux-headers.

On the AMD machine, I use NDISwrapers and the tnet 1130. After I upgraded my kernel and headers, I rebooted the machine and the wireless connection came back up without any trouble.

I followed the same procedure on my Thinkpad which uses a Netgear WG511v2. I upgraded the kernel, added the appropriate headers and rebooted. That was a bit troublesome because I had to reinstall dldrinstall.run which is the Linuxant driveloader program.

Once I ran the program, it uninstalled the current driveloader and replaced it with one that had come out since the release of Ubuntu 5.10. I also had to reinstall the w32 drivers. For some reason, the Netgear card doesn't work with NDISwrappers and my best solution was Linuxant.

Since most distributors back-load the latest kernel improvements to their current kernel builds, the NDIS wireless layer in the newer release from kernel.org may have something to do with the incompatibility I found. We can check that out later.

In the meantime, consider this work-around.