acer laptop problems with wireless and printing

[Victor Sterpu]

Dave Stevens wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a friend who has an Acer TravelMate 2480 laptop. I've been trying to 
> get him to use Ubuntu instead of the currently installed MS Windows XP 
> Professional. I partitioned the disk and installed Ubuntu 7.10 on one 
> partition. He now has a working dual boot. The problem area are only two but 
> I can't seem to make any headway on them.
>
> For one thing, he has a Atheros AR5007EG wireless network NIC. This doesn't 
> work in Ubuntu although it does in Windows. I could add a USB wireless NIC 
> and then could presumably pick one for which there is good support (is there 
> one like that?) but my friend assures me that carrying it around is a pain in 
> the extremity and he would not likely do so, losing a huge amount of 
> functionality and in practice making the conversion to Linux fail. I've found 
> solutions advertised using nswrapper and a workaround using a source only 
> package that I could in principal compile and link to test. This, even if it 
> works, seems like a huge fuss, given the very large numbers of these laptops 
> on the market - is there really no better solution?
>
>   
Have you activated the restricted drivers for atheros?
Maybe this can fix your problem.
I also have a Atheros Wireless card on a Acer - AR2413.
I use Rutilt Wlan manager to detect wireless networks.

If after you activated restricted drivers, you still can't see the 
wireless network do a ifconfig ath0 up.
Maybe is just not up.
If it stll does not work you must use the madwifi package to compile a 
driver.
http://madwifi.org/
MadWIfi is a team of volunteer developers working on Linux kernel 
drivers for Wireless LAN devices with Atheros chipsets. 

> Another problem is that this laptop has no parallel port, so he can not plug 
> in his Canon 4100 printer - it is parallel only. He has a USB to parallel 
> adapter cable. This works fine with his desktop system (XP) just by plugging 
> it in. Connects, installs the driver, prints, just as advertised. But I can 
> not get it to work in either XP Pro or Ubuntu 7.10 on the laptop. No idea 
> why. Have (on Windows) updated everything in sight and the manufacturer's 
> driver CD contains only an unhelpful note that XP will recognize it 
> automatically. For the desktop unit that seems to be borne out, so why not on 
> the laptop? A Windows solution (I know this is the Ubuntu list) would be 
> handy, a solution on Ubuntu even better.
>   
This convertors don't really work with all the devices.
I had the same problem and I used a very old laptop with sutch a port.
I remember the problem was the number of the paralel port.
Paralel an serial ports are deprecated compared to usb.
> Ideas? Pointers to docs?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Dave
>
>   

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