[ubuntu-uk] Installing a wireless driver on a machine converted to Ubuntu from Windows

[Rowan Berkeley]

On 29/01/13 09:43, Rowan Berkeley wrote:
> On 29/01/13 09:18, Robert McWilliam wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013, at 08:31 AM, Rowan Berkeley wrote:
>>> So, if you please, what should I do next?
>> With the wireless card being listed as unclaimed there will be no loaded
>> driver for it.
>>
>> I think the reasons split along two lines: the driver you installed
>> doesn't work with the card or the driver isn't getting loaded. We can
>> hopefully figure out which it is by manually loading the driver.
>>
>> If the driver is properly installed then `sudo insmod <module name>`
>> should insert it - it will then be shown in the list from `lsmod`. After
>> that check again with `lshw` to see if the wireless card is still listed
>> as unclaimed. If so, that isn't the driver for this card (or has some
>> bug such that it isn't picking it up). If it is now claimed then check
>> if it's working and we can sort out getting the module loaded
>> automatically in future.
> This is the second time I have followed instructions found on an 
> Ubuntu Forum thread and acclaimed by the original questioner there as 
> the answer to his problem, but found that they seem to have no 
> relation to the world I and my machines inhabit. The driver package I 
> have downloaded is the correct one, I'm fairly certain, and I have 
> extracted it to my Home folder, but the driver package is a whole 
> folder in itself...
Maybe I'm being unfair; it's much more probable I'm misunderstanding the 
statements made on the Ubuntu Forums. Now the driver itself is 
apparently called rt2860sta. When I do "modinfo rt2860sta" I get "could 
not find module rt2860sta". Whether correctly installed or not, the 
whole package is sitting in my Home directory, so why can't modinfo find 
it? It may sometimes appear with a suffix, viz .o or .ko, but the search 
should still find it.