Wireless network troubleshooter
Make sure that working device drivers are installed
In this step you can check to see if you can get working device drivers for your wireless adapter. A device driver is a piece of software which tells the computer how to make a hardware device work properly. Even though the wireless adapter has been recognized by the computer, it may not have drivers which work very well. You may be able to find different drivers for the wireless adapter which do work. Try some of the options below:
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Check to see if your wireless adapter is on a list of supported devices
Most Linux distributions keep a list of wireless devices that they have support for. Sometimes, these lists provide extra information on how to get the drivers for certain adapters working properly. Go to the list for your distribution (for example, Ubuntu, Fedora or openSuSE) and see if your make and model of wireless adapter is listed. You may be able to use some of the information there to get your wireless drivers working.
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Look for additional open or proprietary drivers
Although Ubuntu includes support for a large amount of devices, some drivers need to be installed separately. Use the Additional Drivers tool to check for these extra open or proprietary drivers.
Click the button at the far right side of the menu bar and select System Settings.
In the Hardware section, click Additional Drivers.
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Use the Windows drivers for your adapter
In general, you cannot use a device driver designed for one operating system (like Windows) on another operating system (like Linux). This is because they have different ways of handling devices. For wireless adapters, however, you can install a compatibility layer called NDISwrapper which lets you use some Windows wireless drivers on Linux. This is useful because wireless adapters almost always have Windows drivers available for them, whereas Linux drivers are sometimes not available. You can learn more about how to use NDISwrapper here. Note that not all wireless drivers can be used through NDISwrapper.
Full information on ndiswrapper kept on this page including troubleshooting help specific to ndiswrapper.
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More Information
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