topherBLOG Nurdery, and the life of a very proud husband and father.

MSI Wind – Mac/Ubuntu – Wireless – 802.11bgn 1t2r

My wife so very lovingly gave me the fantastic MSI Wind netbook for christmas. It is awesome!

She is a very savvy shopper and got the 6 cell battery, 2GB ram and even an external USB dvd-writer. What a woman!

After reading triple book install guide at msiwind.net I could not wait to give it a try.

Some christmas money afforded me the 500GB hard drive. It now multi boots Windows XP, Ubuntu, and Mac OSX. Nothing new there.

I could not get the wireless to work in MAC OSX. I tried all sorts of different drivers but none worked. I ran belarc in windows and it showed the wireless card as a 802.11bgn 1t2r mini card wireless adapter.

Some googling got me to this driver - http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/drivers/STA_RT2860%20D-1.1.1.0%20UI-1.6.8.0_2008_12_04.dmg.

It works. I now have the wireless working on MAC OSX.

It just worked. it just did. I am writing this in hopes that others may find it and save them from hours of looking for the proper drivers for their wind.

UPDATE: I also have Ubuntu 8.10. I now my wireless works on all 3 OS's

UBUNTU INSTRUCTIONS (source):

1) Install Ubuntu.

2) Download Linux driver from ASUS (card is Atheros(R) AR8121/AR8113 PCI-E): http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?product=1&SLanguage=us-en&type=map&model=P5KPL-CM (note: click on "Drivers" and find "Support Linux Drivers", which is zip file).

3) Unrar them and transfer to USB drive and place in your EEE.

4) Cd to the src directory (<usb drive mount>/LinuxDrivers/L1e_Lan/l1e-l2e-linux-v1.0.0.4/src)

5) sudo KBUILD_NOPEDANTIC=1 make

6) sudo KBUILD_NOPEDANTIC=1 make install

7) A file called atl1e.ko is made, that’s your driver. Move to: /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/kernel/drivers/net/atl1e/at1le.ko (If for some reason the atl1e directory isn’t made, just sudo mkdir atl1e, your kernel name may be different)

8 ) Move into the directory from step 7 and: sudo insmod ./atl1e.ko

That’s it, you should have working wired internet now! If it does work, you'll see the Network Icon immediately start to change to two circles, indicating that it is retrieving an IP address from DHCP.

If you want to have the module load automatically (and you surely do), run

9 ) sudo depmod

UPDATE : 12/16/2009 - Mirror for Linux Drivers here.