Texas Instruments ACX 111 wireless card. Wailing and gnashing of teeth.

RocketFalls

I inherited my dad's old laptop a few months back and promptly installed Karmic. It was great. fast. Uncluttered. Customisable. Made me feel like a haxxor etc. In short, I'd love to use this system in lieu of Windows.

Problem was, the machine's wireless card would not be recognized by the OS. Now, I have very little expertise in any kind of command-line tomfoolery, so I scoured the Ubuntu forums for something even semi-understandable.
Some stuff came up, but it always took it for granted that I knew how to accomplish certain actions.

Same story when I tried Puppy and then Lucid out of desperation.

Should I just knuckle down and learn command-line inside out? Or has anybody encountered this bug and gotten through it?

The card is 'Texas Instruments ACX 111' and there IS a downloadable..ptach..fix..thing for it, but I can't seem to install it even when I read the forum stuff.
Halp?

Oh. Wired internet seems to work fine, but I've got the desktop for that. Except the desktop is slow and sounds like a little cyclone.

djmarkus

Where is this "patch thing"

z0oT

After a bit of googling the only option seems to be the following:
http://acx100.sourceforge.net/
I take it this is the one you've tried? What are the error messages you're getting?

Failing everything you could give using the XP driver a shot with ndiswrapper. Tutorial here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper/FAQ

mach1982

You could just get a USB wireless dongle for a few Euro. When come to wireless in Linux , the chipset that matters not make or model .Ndiswrapper should work too.

niallb

Neater to replace the minipci card inside. More than likely you can just unclip the Texas Instruments one and replace it with something better supported for much the same price as the USB. It depends on your laptop model, but it's worth looking into.
It's probably just two screws and unclip the antennas.

dubhthach

Years ago I had a laptop with a Broadcom mini-pci card in it. Of course it didn't work under any form of Unix/Linux. Simple fix was to buy an Intel mini-pci wirless card and replaced it. Allowed me run Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris without a bother.

Naikon

This is why I NEVER buy hardware that does not provide documentation to allow Open Source developers to re-implement a free driver for Linux and the like. The Only exception I make is the Nvidia Blob drivers. I hate the fact I am just renting this bloody 8800GTS from Nvidia. It's not Linux's fault that 95% of the cheap Chinese made hardware is built for Windows.

dubhthach

Naikon wrote: »

This is why I NEVER buy hardware that does not provide documentation to allow Open Source developers to re-implement a free driver for Linux and the like. The Only exception I make is the Nvidia Blob drivers. I hate the fact I am just renting this bloody 8800GTS from Nvidia. It's not Linux's fault that 95% of the cheap Chinese made hardware is built for Windows.

Nice thing about Nvidia is they produce a Solaris driver as well of course good thing about Solaris in this regard is that with a stable driver API it's guaranteed not to break 3rd party drivers with every new build release.

Naikon

dubhthach wrote: »

Nice thing about Nvidia is they produce a Solaris driver as well of course good thing about Solaris in this regard is that with a stable driver API it's guaranteed not to break 3rd party drivers with every new build release.

Thats the reason it's the only binary driver I will tolerate(desktop, never server) because it runs on pretty much all the main Unix'es. FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, Windows too.
Good compat no doubt. It breaks all the time on Linux with main library upgrades, but it's worth it alone for the performance. I have not seen another driver that matches it's performance.

I remeber reading an article by an Nvidia dev, and he basically stated it's technically a Windows driver with a small shim interface wrapper for handling Win dwm
Xorg solaris/Linux ect. It would be nice if they had more disclosure, but I guess it's all trade secrets to Nvidia and it's associated partners. Who knows.

RocketFalls

djmarkus wrote: »

Where is this "patch thing"

This is as close as I could get to it. http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/Distribution_list/Ubuntu

Again, I really have no Linux expertise whatsoever. Might just look into getting a usb dongle.

Shame, since it's such a nice OS..

Oh, wait. And this. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=324148&page=11

niallb

And what happened when you typed "ndiswrapper -l", or "ndiswrapper -i" ?
Did you have the windows drivers for the card to hand ?