AR5006EG wireless drivers for Ubuntu Gnome Linux on Acer Aspire 5100

As stated in a couple articles back, I recently made the move to Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon. There were a few hurdles I had to get over along the way and I wanted to share with you the solutions that worked for me.

The title of this post states that I'm using an Acer Aspire 5100 and that I was having difficulties setting up the internal AR5006EG wireless controller. Luckily, Google is a great resource and by mixing a few suggestions together I was able to get online. I have not tested it out but I believe that the following steps would work on any system that is built on the Debian Platform or use ndiswrapper.

The site that gave the most accurate configuration was quilombo's wordpress blog. I'll do a very short summary of what he suggested and then follow up with the one step that was missing which solved all the problems.

1. Disable auth_pci
   command line
   echo 'blacklist auth_pci' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
2. Install ndiswrapper from terminal:
   command line
   sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper

   OR
   graphical interface

   sudo apt-get install ndisgtk
3. Download the correct drivers:
   
   32 bit OS > 32 bit AR5006EG wireless drivers

   OR

   64 bit OS > 64 bit AR5006EG wireless drivers
4. Extract the driver files to desired location
5. Install net5211.inf using ndiswrapper
   command line
   sudo ndiswrapper -i net5211.inf

   OR
   graphical interface (ndisgtk)

   filename: "net5211.inf”
6. Save ndiswrapper module configuration files
   command line
   sudo ndiswrapper -ma && sudo ndiswrapper -mi

Now this is where the previous tutorial suggest we reboot

If you feel lucky you can reboot after this step and hope everything works. If it doesn't then I hope you have this page bookmarked so you can do 2 more steps that worked for me. Just like in step 1 we need to disable 2 more automatic services that created a conflict with our hardware.

7. Disable auth_hal
   command line
   echo 'blacklist auth_hal' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
8. Disable the open source bcm43xx driver
   command line
   echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
9. Go ahead and reboot. Ubuntu should automatically recognize your AR5006EG wireless card.