So as i said before, i have no ethernet ports where this server is going to live so i needed to get some sort of wireless card into it.
I had a Phillips SNU6500 lying around and i thought i’d go ahead and see if it would work on Ubuntu. Well the answer is no, Ubuntu does not have any native drivers for this Card.
However, i was surprised to find out that there is a tool called ndiswrapper which allows you to use Windows drivers on Linux, this blew me away – so i had to try it before i went out and bought a supported card.
First off i started by hooking the Dell 650 up to my keyboard, mouse and monitor (take note Sun Fire!) which made it easy to get the machine up and running and into the desktop.
Also the guys who i bought this server from on EBay had gone to quite a bit of trouble to get all of the right drivers for the machine pre-installed. So it worked straight out of the box.
The first thing i did was immediately upgrade the machine from Ubuntu 9 to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS using an ethernet connection.
Once this was completed – i installed the following “.deb” files in this order, the last one is the graphical front end – which i did not use.
- ndiswrapper-common_1.50-1ubuntu1_all.deb
- ndiswrapper-utils-1.9_1.56-1_i386.deb
- ndisgtk_0.8.5-1_i386.deb
Oke so once you’ve got all this downloaded and installed – you’ll want to dig out your Phillips SNU6500 and get out the Driver CD
Otherwise download the drivers from the following URL : http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/dcbint/cpindex.pl?ctn=SNU6500/00&scy=fr&slg=en&mid=Link_Software
Steps:
1. Unzip the driver somewhere on the linux machine
2. Navigate to the folder SNU6500-v1.0.0.27/Driver/ in the temporary folder
3. Run ndiswrapper -i CPWUA6D.INF
4. At this point reboot the machine.
5. When the machine comes back you should see the blue LED on the USB unit start flashing. Its alive!
6. From here on you can use the Network Manager Applet to store the details of your wireless network and connect.
This was by far the easiest WIFI setup i’ve seen on Linux and its been working great. Onwards and upwards!
Couple of notes
- I did NOT have to edit /etc/network/interfaces
- In order to get my wlan connection to auto connect each time i rebooted i had to check the “All users can use this connection” checkbox in network settings.
