Wireless network

With my new XUbuntu Feisty I encountered some problems with my wireless connection. In both a dell latitude C610 as well as a dell latitude 100l my ASUS WL-100g Deluxe could not be used out of the box.
The module bcm43xx was loaded, but the card could not be used, even after installing the bcm43xx-fwcutter package

Then I installed ndiswrapper and extracted the firmware from the Win2K driver

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

This ASUS driver seems a bit buggy: the network goes down after some time, varying between 10 and 45 minutes. I switched to the Dell True mobile driver R83097.EXE (AR variant) which seems to work stable

We must make sure the bcm43xx kernel module is not loaded after the next reboot; the ndiswrapper module must be loaded instead. This is done by blacklisting the original module

echo "blacklist bcm43xx" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

and making sure ndiswrapper gets loaded

echo "ndiswrapper" >> /etc/modules

Now wpa_supplicant must be configured by creating the file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=1
#ap_scan=0
#ap_scan=1
ap_scan=2
fast_reauth=1

### Example of basic WPA-PSK secured AP
network={
ssid="Name"
psk=...
pairwise=TKIP
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
scan_ssid=1
priority=10
}

### Associate with any open access point
### Scans/ESSID changes can be done with wpa_cli
network={
ssid=""
key_mgmt=NONE
}

And the we must tell the system it need to use wpa_supplicant for my wireless interface wlan0 in my case by insertion of the following section in the /etc/network/interfaces file

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

After a reboot we are connected and report our findings ...

UPDATE 21-11-2007
Gutsy, Ubuntu 7.10, now offers support for the wireless card through the restricted drivers!
Now my wireless interface is called eth1 and the interfaces file looks like

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wpa-driver wext
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf