Getting old Inventel Wireless adapter to work on Ubuntu Linux

I've had an old Inventel USB adapter (UR054g)hanging around for a while, and previous attempts have failed at getting it to work in Ubuntu. I think this was supplied when we first had a LiveBox from Freeserve (bought by Orange - may be wrong was a while ago)

However, latest effort has gone very well! I'm using Ubuntu 10.10, and the following process seems to have got it working. The device is auto loaded by Ubuntu when you plug it in, but the important step is to make sure you have the correct firmware that is loaded to the stick when it is plugged in.

I used the instructions from here...http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/p54

which basically boil down to download the right firmware, in my case the chip inside is a isl3887usb, so I downloaded from http://daemonizer.de/prism54/prism54-fw/fw-usb/2.13.25.0.lm87.arm, rename the file to isl3887usb and copied it to /libs/firmware (you need to do this as root).

You can find out the chip used in the device by using lsusb in a terminal, and one line shows something like :

Bus 002 Device 008: ID 1435:0427 Wistron NeWeb

I then used the device ID 1435:0427 in Google and found out it was the isl3887usb.

Restart the driver by

modprobe -r p54pci

modprobe p54pci

Add hey presto, it all starts working.