My USB wifi dongle doesn't work on Ubuntu 8.10 and later!

[calrogman]

When I first started using Ubuntu (8.04) on my laptop, the first thing I noticed was that the built in WiFi doesn't work. This was remedied by buying a USB WiFi dongle.

I bought the LM001 dongle from "LM-Technologies", and on kernels 2.6.x and 2.4.x the drivers are supposed to compile cleanly, however upon upgrading to 8.10 (on the day of release, foolishly without first trying the LiveCD) I found the drivers no longer compile. The same is true of Debian Lenny.

I have tried to track down newer drivers and/or firmware, however Google returns very little useful information (even when using Google Linux)

If anyone else has had a similiar problem and has found a solution can you please post it here?

lsusb shows:

Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0ace:1215 ZyDAS WLA-54L WiFi

The product page (which only provides Windows drivers) is here.

The drivers which came with the dongle, and the user guide are below.

[chili555]

I wonder if this works with the in-built module, zd1211rw. Please do:

sudo modprobe zd1211rw

Did your dongle spring to life?

[calrogman]

I wonder if this works with the in-built module, zd1211rw. Please do:

sudo modprobe zd1211rw

Did your dongle spring to life?

Running this from inside a Xubuntu 9.04b virtual machine, with USB passthrough enabled doesn't do anything other than cause "iwlist scan" to hang until interrupted.

I'll try again once I burn to a CD and boot from that directly.

[calrogman]

Ubuntu 9.04 from CD non-virtualised doesn't work either.
Might need to track down some newer firmware.

[chili555]

I believe a newer zd1211rw may be in linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic. Can you please install that?

[calrogman]

I believe a newer zd1211rw may be in linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic. Can you please install that?

That would make more sense if I was running Intrepid instead of 9.04b.
After installing linux-backports-modules-jaunty-generic and running

modprobe zd1211rw

ifconfig wlan0 up

complains of a timeout error.

Really hope I can get this working, I love 9.04 but if I can't get the wifi working it won't be touching my HDD.

[chili555]

complains of a timeout error.

Times out trying to get an IP address or what? At least we have signs of life, pulse, breath, etc.

It would help to know more. Are you using Network Manager or manual configuration? Are you certain the interface is wlan0? Did you tell it what ESSID you wish to connect to?

[calrogman]

Times out trying to get an IP address or what? At least we have signs of life, pulse, breath, etc.

It would help to know more. Are you using Network Manager or manual configuration? Are you certain the interface is wlan0? Did you tell it what ESSID you wish to connect to?

When I run

ifconfig wlan0 up

I get a message stating "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Timeout Error" or something along those lines, and the firmware doesn't load.

I'll check that I've got that error message right as soon as I have a chance.

I am certain the interface is wlan0 and I use manual configuration as I find the network manager to be very buggy.

I didn't get a chance to give it an essid to connect to as the interface won't "go up".

[chili555]

I am certain the interface is wlan0

One way to be sure is to run:

iwconfig

See which interface has all the details.

[calrogman]

One way to be sure is to run:

iwconfig

See which interface has all the details.

the interface is wlan0

*facepalm*