Re: acer laptop problems with wireless and printing

Dave Stevens wrote:

Hi,

I have a friend who has an Acer TravelMate 2480 laptop. I've been trying to get him to use Ubuntu instead of the currently installed MS Windows XP Professional. I partitioned the disk and installed Ubuntu 7.10 on one partition. He now has a working dual boot. The problem area are only two but I can't seem to make any headway on them.

For one thing, he has a Atheros AR5007EG wireless network NIC. This doesn't work in Ubuntu although it does in Windows. I could add a USB wireless NIC and then could presumably pick one for which there is good support (is there one like that?) but my friend assures me that carrying it around is a pain in the extremity and he would not likely do so, losing a huge amount of functionality and in practice making the conversion to Linux fail. I've found solutions advertised using nswrapper and a workaround using a source only package that I could in principal compile and link to test. This, even if it works, seems like a huge fuss, given the very large numbers of these laptops on the market - is there really no better solution?

Have you activated the restricted drivers for atheros?
Maybe this can fix your problem.
I also have a Atheros Wireless card on a Acer - AR2413.
I use Rutilt Wlan manager to detect wireless networks.

If after you activated restricted drivers, you still can't see the wireless network do a ifconfig ath0 up.
Maybe is just not up.
If it stll does not work you must use the madwifi package to compile a driver.
http://madwifi.org/
MadWIfi is a team of volunteer developers working on Linux kernel drivers for Wireless LAN devices with Atheros chipsets.

Another problem is that this laptop has no parallel port, so he can not plug in his Canon 4100 printer - it is parallel only. He has a USB to parallel adapter cable. This works fine with his desktop system (XP) just by plugging it in. Connects, installs the driver, prints, just as advertised. But I can not get it to work in either XP Pro or Ubuntu 7.10 on the laptop. No idea why. Have (on Windows) updated everything in sight and the manufacturer's driver CD contains only an unhelpful note that XP will recognize it automatically. For the desktop unit that seems to be borne out, so why not on the laptop? A Windows solution (I know this is the Ubuntu list) would be handy, a solution on Ubuntu even better.
This convertors don't really work with all the devices.
I had the same problem and I used a very old laptop with sutch a port.
I remember the problem was the number of the paralel port.
Paralel an serial ports are deprecated compared to usb.
Ideas? Pointers to docs?

Thanks in advance,

Dave


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