Installing wireless adapter drivers from CD (no ethernet connection...)

I recently built my first computer and installed the newest version of Ubuntu on it (note: I'm new to Linux). However, I didn't have a wireless card (and no ethernet either), so I got a wireless USB (netis ac1200 wireless dual band usb adapter). It came with a CD with drivers for Linux but I have no idea how to install them! Yes, it has a readme and a PDF for install instructions. I read through them and tried to follow the directions but I keep getting errors when I try to install with the terminal.

The install.sh file on the CD is supposed to be what I can use to easily install the drivers. However when I right-click the file on the CD and try to set the permissions to run it as a file it doesn't allow me to do that.

Meanwhile, if I move the install.sh file to the Desktop and allow it to run as a program and then try sudo ./install.sh I get a bunch of errors when trying to run it (it can't find the Makefile, etc.).

Any suggestions before I go any further?

I really don't want to have to go back to Windows but this is getting very frustrating! Two weeks I've been struggling with this install of drivers.

2 Answers

You probably can't. As you've already seen, the install.sh can't be made executable on the CD as it is a read-only medium. You need read-write-execute.

Next, the install.sh needs other files that are in the folder with the install.sh, so you'd need to drag and drop the entire folder to any convenient place, your desktop, for example.

Even when you do this, the install.sh actually compiles source code. Compiling requires linux-headers which are included in recent Ubuntu versions but not some older versions. You also need a package called build-essential which is a meta package of other packages.

Finally, many of the driver discs are too old to be useful; that is, they were built for kernel version 2.8 or some such, and will not compile on kernel versions 3.xx and 4.xx.

I suggest you identify the device from the command:

lsusb

Post the result and let's see if we can help you.

The easiest thing to do would be to just leave the script in the folder on the CD, as it most likely references other files relative to its location, then navigate to it using cd and run it from the terminal. (Keep in mind that external drives in Linux aren't mounted as D: and E: like Windows, but rather a folder, such as /media//. You'll probably want to figure out its mount point from the GUI and then navigate to it in the terminal.) I've always had trouble running .sh scripts from the GUI, so I'd stick with the terminal. If there's a .deb, you can probably run that from the GUI, but since it includes a .sh file, you'll probably want to try that first.