SmarterBlog

Ubuntu Wireless Joy

December 22nd, 2007 by bri

I decided to have a go at installing the latest version of Ubutnu (7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon) on my desktop machine the other day (with some trepidation - I’ve had trouble with Linux before involving spending several days trying to get a Radeon card to work!).

To my extreme joy everything worked fine as soon as the install had finished - everything except Wireless. I trawled the web and the Ubuntu forums for at least two days searching for an answer. The wireless pci card seemed to be recognised and installed okay (a Linksys WMPG54) without me having to lift a finger, but it didn’t seem to be able to communicate with the router - executing “sudo iwconfig” from a terminal window showed no Access Point association.

After much scratching of the head I finally hit upon the solution - using the same command, “sudo iwconfig” showed that the Frequency was set to 2.412 GHz (a.k.a Channel 1) - I checked my router settings and found that it was set to broadcast on Channel 13! So simply altering the router to broadcast on Channel 1, and rebooting the Ubuntu box fixed the problem, and I’m now able to write this post!

(posted by Bri)

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under operating system. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.