Recently I decided to upgrade my laptop from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft (Ubuntu) out of boredom. As usual there were several things which ended up broken. My wireless was the most frustrating of these.

After scouring forums and following every help guide I could find I still was stuck. Compiling ndiswrapper from source wasn’t helping, it didn’t matter what version of the bcmwl5 driver I used, it just didn’t work. Now to clarify the specific wireless card I have in the laptop is thus:

Which I’ve heard several complaints about. In the end I did manage to get it working and for the sake of brevity I’ll simply post the solution.

If you are running the 2.6.17.10 kernel (as I was) you might be stuck, you may even have a problem if you are running any of the sub-versions of the 2.6.17 kernel. So I went out and compiled the 2.6.18 kernel following this guide How to compile 2.6.18

After compiling the kernel you then need to go out and download the source code for ndiswrapper, I used 1.28. After compiling and installing use the windows driver as usual and you should be up and running again.

In the wee hours of the morning as I work on compiling random bits and pieces here and there I stumbled across a problem when attempting to compile gd and have it recognize my jpeg-6b libraries. I thought it worth noting that gd is specifically looking for ‘libjpeg.so’, which on my particular system doesn’t exist, instead I have a copy of ‘libjpeg.so.62′ which I simply created a softlink to the file and ran ‘configure’ again.

Don’t forget to set your CPPFLAGS environment variable to include your jpeg-6b header files!!

Once again all is right with the world.