A Series of Tubes

I have Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) running on Artemis (my desktop), but until a few minutes ago, it had no internet connection, due to lack of drivers for the wifi card in the machine, the Realtek 8185.

I’m used to not knowing how to do anything on Linux, and usually my attempts to make things work on the open source OS end in failure, so it’s pretty cool that I figured out how to get this to work.

First, I found this tutorial [link dead], which I followed word-for-word, with no results at all. Then I checked my chipset on the wifi card, and realized that the article is for the 8187, not the 8185. So I decided to take a leap of faith, and downloaded the Win98 drivers for the 8185 (Win98 because they are the version of the 8187 drivers the tutorial uses), and then followed the tutorial again, but with the new drivers instead of the original ones.

Guess what? It worked. Flawlessly. Artemis now has wifi under Hardy Heron, and I couldn’t be happier. Now for the graphics card and my mouse…

Edit: If this doesn’t work, try this method instead!