Install a non-linux USB Wireless adapter on Ubuntu 1


Wow! This has turned out to be a real pain.  Below is a process I started, but ran into issues.  I could see the module, but it would never make a Wlan0 to access using iwconfig or ifconfig.

I tried this on the Trendnet TEW-229UB and the TEW-424UB.  Maybe because they are cheap devices, but heck, I spent something like $25 for both, and in Windows, they work perfectly.

After I had depmod -a and the ndiswrapper module listed (lsmod), everything seemed ok.  The syslog had no errors on the 424, but never showed the wlan0.  I could run lshw -C network, but would only show the wired adapter.  I could run lsusb, and it would show the device.  I could even run ndiswrapper -l and the device showed installed and hardware present.  So, what the hell?  No errors, everything working, but no WLAN0 shows up?

If I find more info, I’ll post it.


  1. make sure the ndiswrapper package is installed, so do that.
  2. Make sure that the wireless-tools package is installed. Probably is from the initial install.
  3. Get your wireless driver for Windows XP.
  4. Unpack the driver somewhere, then cd there and run ndiswrapper on driver. Something like so:
    ndiswrapper -i driver.inf

    I installed the Trendnet TEW-229 and that was:
    ndiswrapper -i sis162u.inf

  5. Then let ndiswrapper setup the module.
    ndiswrapper -m
  6. Then run: depmod -a
    After that you’ll see the ndiswrapper module when you run lsmod.

And from here I can see the module, but don’t know what to do… I’ll try to figure it out though, and write it here!