Wednesday 9 May 2012

Raspberry Pi Wifi - WG111T

In this post I will describe the progress I have made so far in getting my WG111T USB wifi adaptor working with Debian Linux on my Raspberry Pi. 

My first stop was to consult the list of supported hardware. This was initially encouraging as it lists the WG111v2 as supported but sadly my WG111T uses a different chipset. This page also links to an example of getting an arbitrary USB wifi device working. This suggested I look for firmware on the linuxwireless.org site. Google suggested that I needed the ar5523 firmware. The change log for this firmware isn't very encouraging as it refers to the kernel panicking when the device is probed. Furthermore it's not clear how I would build and install this firmware.


More googling turned up a wiki page which described in much more detail about how to build and install the firmware. Following these steps I got as far as "dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc" before hitting an error that my version of debhelper was too old. Thankfully I was able to use apt-get to force an upgrade to an appropriately newer version. This got me as far as running "m-a a-i ar5523" where I hit the following error:

Without the kernel headers I am now stuck so my next task is to work out how to get these installed. It was late by this point so I gave up for the night.