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http://images.fixya.com/0/2wire/177x150/41879178.JPG

I installed Ubuntu, and everything works great, except for the fact that I cannot connect to the internet. Is there any way to get the above PC Port to work in Ubuntu (or any Linux distro) without the driver? (Because apparently there is no Linux driver for it. If there is and I just don't know of it, please let me know!)

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is that a USB ethernet card or a USB modem? i can't tell from the picture... – quack quixote Dec 21 '09 at 23:51
Uh, I don't know the difference. Amazon defines it as "The 2Wire(TM) PC Port(TM) makes setting up a home phoneline network for your computers a snap! Just plug the 2Wire PC Port into your computers USB port and into a nearby telephone jack, and you are ready to transmit data smoothly between multiple PCs over existing phone lines. " – Andrew Dec 22 '09 at 0:06
ping. did you ever get this working? is this still an issue? if so, can you provide any more information to help us help you? – quack quixote Jan 23 '10 at 14:08

closed as off topic by quack quixote, Ivo Flipse♦ Jan 24 '10 at 21:58

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1 Answer

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No, there is no way to get this device to work without a driver. However, there may be a Linux driver that works with it.

If this is the same device, it's a USB HomePNA adapter. It provides HomePNA 1.0 and HomePNA 2.0 wire protocols and uses the home phone wiring to connect. (That's an RJ-11 phone plug pictured, not an ethernet-style RJ-45 plug. The device is more like an ethernet card than a modem, it just works over standard home phone wiring.)

The good news is that HomePNA is nothing new; it's been around since 1998, and there is some linux support for it. The bad news is that I can't give you exact directions to get it working (though perhaps someone else here can).

There are many HomePNA related posts on UbuntuForums.org (HomePNA search). There are even some bugreports on Launchpad.net about it. Most of these are relating to much earlier versions of Ubuntu, so things may have changed somewhat with more recent versions. But the overall gist is:

  • the pcnet32 ethernet driver supports (some) HomePNA chipsets, and
  • the driver must be given the homepna=1 option when loaded in order to enable this; to do so, add options pcnet32 homepna=1 to /etc/modules.d/options (or the equivalent for your version of Ubuntu)

I can't guarantee the pcnet32 driver is what you need; this may depend on what chipset your device uses. There was at one time a Linksys binary-only driver for HomePNA 2.0 devices.

You'll need to do some investigating, starting with locating and identifying the device in the file /proc/bus/usb/devices (see here for what the file contains), or using the command lsusb -vv (man page).

If all else fails, you may be able to use NDISwrapper (beginner's guide) to load the Windows drivers for the device.

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