Drivers for the ASUS WL-138g
Of those who own an ASUS WL-138g Wifi-card, many will find that after they set up an ndiswrapper module as described in Using Windows wireless card drivers, the connection either can't be established at all, only supports unencrypted connections, or drops off after a short while. While Asus does provide an updated driver (compared to the original CD), neither will work. And Marvell, who manufactured the Libertas chip and wrote the drivers, flat out refuses to support end users.
So here's how to get your WL-138g working:
- Open a terminal: Pardus Menu -> Programs -> System -> Konsole
- Type: cd Desktop
- Type: mkdir WL-138g
- Type: cd WL-138g
- Type: wget http://nicolas.melay.free.fr/libertas.cab
- Type: cabextract libertas.cab
- You may see, "libertas.cab: WARNING; possible 6912 extra bytes at end of file." — Just ignore
- Close the terminal
- Using Windows wireless card drivers
- Connect to your WPA-protected router
- Have fun!
Notes:
- This driver will probably not work with Pardus 2007.x (The Network Manager was largely rewritten for Pardus 2008).
- Those who updated Pardus 2007.x to Pardus 2008 may also not be able to get this driver to work. In that case, download the latest Pardus LiveCD and ndiswrapper the drivers in this environment. If that works... sorry, reinstall your computer with latest Pardus.
- WPA is supported. As far as WPA2 is concerned, your milage may vary.
- Some routers refer to WPA as PSK-Personal.
- Set the encryption protocol to TKIP since AES appears to cause connection problems. But again, your milage may vary.
- The card may be slow to connect, sometimes too slow, resulting in a "Could not connect" message. In this case just try to connect again.
This driver was actually distributed by Microsoft, apparently as an update for Windows Vista 32-bit. It is the exact same version number as the 64-bit driver which ASUS did put on line for download (Version 2.7.1.19). On an updated Windows box the driver files may be found under C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download.
