Make wifi work on Ubuntu 9.10

My ubuntu was installed and setup, but wireless doesn't work so it's not connected to internet yet.

First of all I tried to make a linksys WUSB11 v1 work. This is the 802.11b usb adapter connected to the mechine and being used by WinXP system. Ubuntu 9.10 default installation has WUSB11 driver installed but unfornately the driver is for v2.6 and up. After trying for a while I decided to buy a new one , hopefully a plug and play one.

I got a TP-Link WN353G PCI card for cheap from pccyber. According to the hardware support document from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported, the card should be work out of the box.

No it's not. The bootloader GRUB will stop in the middle and the mechine just freeze. Don't know why. Maybe what I got is WN353G and the document says WN353GD?

There seems to be a native driver for this card, but it's a lot of work to do. So I decided to go the path of using ndiswrapper, which wraps up windows driver for Linux. The following is how I make it work.

1. Download ndiswrapper packages.
Since the mechine is offline, so I download them on another mechine and copy them over using USB disk.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/misc/ndiswrapper-common
http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/misc/ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/net/ndisgtk

2. Install the packages in the order
sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-common_*.deb
sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-utils-*.deb
sudo dpkg -i ndisgtk_*.deb

3. Install windows driver on Ubuntu
After installed ndiswrapper (all 3 packages) , open Windows Wireless Drivers from System->Administration menu.Then click Install New Drivers and select your Windows card driver file to install. The driver file should be *.inf from the disc accompanied with the card. I chose the one for windows2000.

Finally,the installed network card driver will list in the left box.You can click the network manager icon at right-top of your screen and find wireless network.

After the above installation, the system reboots successfully and my wifi AP is autimatically detected. After configuring the wireless network such as security, the system is connected!