Using the D‑Link DWA-125 with Ubuntu 10.04

Sasha device drivers, internet, technology

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 rt2
    which 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. 

Sasha

Hello. I’m Sasha Ger­rand, a soft­ware developer. I design and cre­ate high volume trans­ac­tional tech­no­logy (along with other things). I write code in Open Source pro­gram­ming lan­guages. I do things with data sources and trans­ac­tional sys­tems. I use vir­tu­al­ised machines for my server envir­on­ments. I spend a fair pro­por­tion of my days liv­ing in the shell. I like POSIX com­pli­ant oper­at­ing sys­tems and FOSS products.

3 thoughts to “Using the D‑Link DWA-125 with Ubuntu 10.04”

  1. I’ve been trying to make my D‑link DWA-125 adapter work in ubuntu 10.04 lucid lynx by a few days by now.
    I find your method to be simple but with the problem that D‑Link does not provide any Ubuntu driver for DWA-125 as is required in your explanation. They offer drivers for: winxp (32 and 64), win vista (32 and 64) and win7 (32 and 64)

    If you have a link to a DWA-125 linux driver download, please share it.
    Thanks

  2. A Linux driver for the DWA-125 is on the D‑Link FTP site, as per the original post above. You will need to compile and install the new driver, again as per the instructions, in order for the device to be usable on Ubuntu 10.04, as the current driver in that release is out of date and unusable.

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