In an attempt at a slightly less lame post this week, I’ll recount how I got a wireless USB adapter to work under Ubuntu. You might find yourself in situation in which a wireless USB adapter makes more sense that installing a normal wireless card, in which case, these instructions might be useful.

Although I did this specifically for the D-Link DWL-G120 (802.11g, 54Mbps) under Ubuntu, the general approach will probably work for other D-Link models and should be general enough to work under any Linux distribution. I used the native Windows drivers with ndiswrapper, but if you’re squeamish about ndiswrapper, don’t worry, its easier than it looks.

If you haven’t done so already, install Wine:

apt-get install wine

Next, insert the driver CD that came with the adapter, and as root, run its setup.exe under wine:

sudo su
cd /media/cdrom/Drivers
wine setup.exe

This installs the driver under your emulated Windows file hierarchy, which, since you ran this as root, will be under the root home in a directory called .wine . Now you just have to let ndiswrapper know about it. For my driver, I ran this:

ndiswrapper -i /root/.wine/drive_c/Program\\ Files/Drivers/Dr71WU.inf

You can confirm that ndiswrapper successfully installed the native Windows driver by running this next:

ndiswrapper -l

Which should output: “driver present, hardware present”. Next run this command:

iwconfig wlan0

Which again, can be confirmed by running this and seeing if wlan0 appears:

ifconfig

Now all you have to do is configure your networking as you normally would under the Gnome menu option: System -> Administration -> Networking.