Netgear Wireless USB Adapter WNDA3100 on linux

Getting the Netgear Wireless USB Adapter to work

After struggling with the netgear wireless usb adapter myself I decided to contribute to greatness that is the Internet, since I saw many people having the same problem and different solutions being offered online, that not everyone seem understood.

Netgear Wireless USB Adapter

The key with the installation is that you need to let windows create the necessary files and then make them compatible with linux, which is done by using ndiswrapper.

This is written for absolute Linux beginners so advanced do not complain.

1. Getting your .sys and .inf files (Done on Windows)
• Since most Linux noobs like myself come from Windows I assume you have installed the adapter on a windows system. Navigate to your Program Files directory (on windows) and look for the NETGEAR folder. Look for the Windows 2000 or XP folder and copy all the files in there.
• If you do not have access to a windows systems to extract the driver files, there is a way to do this directly in Ubuntu by using 'wine'. Since this requires more handling on the Ubuntu system and since this is written for absolute beginners I will not discuss that.
2. Getting the ndiswrapper package files
• These files can be found here. You need all three.
3. Place the files on your Ubuntu system
• After you got the files place them in a folder on you Ubuntu system. Note that the driver files will need to stay their permanently so chose a place you will not remove later.
4. Installing the ndiswrapper packages
• Open your terminal window. There are several ways to do this. The easiest is pressing Ctrl+Alt+T. For more ways look here.
• Navigate to your directory where you located the ndiswrapper files using the 'cd' command.
• Execute the following linux commands:
  

  sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-common
  sudo dpkg -i ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
  sudo dpkg -i ndisgtk

  Make sure you do it in this order. If you get any errors check the

  names used after the  '-i' command, since you perhaps gave your files a

  different name or the download server did.  

5. Installing the drivers on Ubuntu
• Navigate to your System Settings (Top right corner) and look for Windows Wireless Drivers. This can also be done by Applications-->System-->Windows Wireless Drivers.
• Enter your password and then use the menu to navigate to the .inf file (step 1) that you stored on Ubuntu to instal the driver.
6. Verify the installation
• Access your terminal again and type: sudo lshw -C network. Next to your Ethernet interface, you should now see something like this: 
• -network
         description: Wireless interface
         physical id: 1
         logical name: wlan0
7. Configuring your Wireless Network
• Navigate to your Network Manager by clicking one of the icons at the top right corner. Here you can now select the desired network and configure this. You can use the same data aas you used under Windows.

Hope this ends everyones quest for the Netgear Wireless USB Adapter on Ubuntu.