~sgerrand

Using the D-Link DWA-125 with Ubuntu 10.04

Caveat

This method has only been tested under Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), but should work for any pre­vi­ous ver­sion of Ubuntu. Addi­tion­ally, the driver com­pile instruc­tions ref­er­enced should work for any mod­ern Linux dis­tri­bu­tion (2.6+ ker­nel). YMMV.

Over­view

The default driver for the D-Link DWA-125 wire­less 150 USB adapter cur­rently avail­able as part of the Ubuntu Linux dis­tri­bu­tion has errors. This art­icle offers a method for fix­ing this issue.

Require­ments

You will need a default Ubuntu install (ideally), a D-Link DWA-125 wire­less USB adapter and access to an account on the machine in ques­tion that has super­user capabilities.

Method

Firstly, plug the device into a USB port and identify it using the fol­low­ing command:

lsusb | grep D-Link

This should return the fol­low­ing text as output:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 07d1:3c0d D-Link System

If the USB device ID is 07d1:3c0d, then con­tinue to the next step. If not, then the device is not the D-Link we are look­ing for and is out of scope.

The issue can be con­firmed by check­ing the sys­tem out­put using one of the fol­low­ing commands:

• grep rt2 /var/log/messages which should return some­thing like this:

  rt2800usb 1-6:1.0: firmware: requesting rt2870.bin

  ; or
• dmesg | grep rt2which should return some­thing sim­ilar to the above output.

The next step is to grab the most cur­rent Linux driver from D-Link, com­pile it and install it. The GNU make pro­gram is needed for this step, but it should already be installed as part of a base Ubuntu install­a­tion. Run the fol­low­ing com­mands to down­load the cur­rent driver source, extract it, com­pile it and finally install it for use:

wget --quiet ftp://www.dlinkla.com/pub/drivers/DWA-125/*LINUX*DWA-125*.tar.gz --directory-prefix=/tmp tar -xzf /tmp/*LINUX*DWA-125*.tar.gz cd /tmp/*RT3070*Linux* make && sudo make install echo "blacklist rt2800usb" | sudo tee --append /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

If the com­mands above com­plete suc­cess­fully, the new driver has been installed and the incor­rect driver has been pre­ven­ted from auto­mat­ic­ally load­ing. Restart the com­puter and the device will be avail­able for use.