[SOLVED] ndiswrapper irritation

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

My family just got cable internet a router and a DWL-G510 (D-link) wireless card for me. I know that the card I have has no official driver for linux(mandrake10.1), but I do know that with ndiswrapper, others have made it work and I have been trying to follow in their footsteps. I installed the mrv8k51 driver, and it ackknowleges that it is installed and the hardware is there(ndiswrapper -l). So why can I still not use the card? I thought the driver would appear in the list when configuring the card from the hardrake thing, but it isn't there either. What do I do now? I couldn't be far off.

[JayMan8081]

Try using iwconfig to manually setup the required parameters for your wireless network (SSID, wep, channel, etc). Also you can try iwlist to see if the card can scan the area for wireless access points. If it comes back with yours listed then the drivers should be installed properly and it's just a matter of setting up your network parameters correctly.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I'll look into that, but is there a GUI method of doing that? I've gone through several network setup things in the management window, but none of that has worked. I don't always need to do things in the GUI, but I'm still not efficient with command line.

When using iwconfig, how would I set up the paramiters? I tried iwconfig before, but I didn't know what I was doing, so nothing came of it(I could have looked through the man pages; that's gotten quite exhausting and time consuming).

[cybertron]

Try this: http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=134777

It's the steps I took getting my D-Link wireless card working.

Also, under Network and Internet in the Control Center you can click Manage Connections and set up the ssid and such for your wireless interface, assuming that it's setup properly so it shows up as wlan0.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I went through that "how I did it" tutorial and according to iwconfig, there aren't any "wlan" devices. I've every thing up to that point, and the man page for iwconfig has nothing on making wlan devices. Mandrake 10.1 never seems to work the way I expect, or the ways everyone tells me it will.

[retsaw]

Have you done "modprobe ndiswrapper" to load the driver? The wlan interface won't show up until you do.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Yes, I've done that modprobe thing, and it worked as far as I could tell. There apparently a lot of other people out there with the same card on linux and I've been trying to do what they did. This is the only part that went differently from them.(so far)

[cybertron]

If you do "lsmod" does ndiswrapper show up? Also, if you do "ifconfig wlan0 up" what error does it give you?

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

The fist time I did "lsmod", it wasn't there. I figured that's what "modprobe" was supposed to have done, so I did that again. The second "lsmod" had ndiwrapper at the top of the huge list. The "ifconfig wlan0 up" told me "wlan0: unknown Interface: No such device". I also noticed that in the "lsmod" list, there was a column for "used by" and for ndiswrapper, it said 0.(Idon't know if that matters) I've done the "modprobe ndiswrapper" command several times before; I think it keeps going back to the way it was when it turns off, it kept doing that when I was messing with "hdparm" too.

[cybertron]

That's a pretty tricky problem there. I don't think the used by 0 in lsmod is a problem as my laptop has the same thing. Is it possible that your wireless isn't being recognized as wlan0 but instead as eth1 or something like that? You could try "ifconfig eth1 up" instead.

Hmm, just visited the ndiswrapper Wiki and discovered that there are two revisions of this card that both use different drivers. Have you checked yours to make sure you have the right one?

Just out of curiousity, are you using the latest ndiswrapper or the one that is included with Mandrake (which as I recall is very old)?

Found another good installation guide here: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/Installation

This one tells you what you should expect to happen when you do each step as well, so maybe you can discover where it's going wrong.

Well, that's probably enough for now:)

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Mine is the latest(Ithink), I'll lookn into that guide later.

[cybertron]

From the ndiswrapper wiki it appears that the latest revision would be B which uses a different chipset (Atheros) than the original (Marvell). I assume you're using the Marvell driver based on the name you gave. Is that the driver that came on the CD, or did you have to download it somewhere?

You can check for sure which one yours is by using lspci. First do plain "lspci" and make note of the first XX:XX.X numbers. Then do "lspci -n" and see what pciid your card has. For instance, in mine the pciid is 168c:001a. There are entries in the wiki (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/List) for both of the revisions, so see which pciid matches yours and that way you'll know for sure that you're using the right driver.
[cybertron@Tuxtop ~]$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 05 )
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 42)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801CAM ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801CAM IDE U100 (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM SMBus Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Control ler (rev 02)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 Go] (rev b2 )
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 78)
02:04.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc.: Unknown device 001a ( rev 01)
[cybertron@Tuxtop ~]$ lspci -n
00:00.0 Class 0600: 8086:1a30 (rev 05)
00:01.0 Class 0604: 8086:1a31 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 Class 0c03: 8086:2482 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 Class 0c03: 8086:2484 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 Class 0604: 8086:2448 (rev 42)
00:1f.0 Class 0601: 8086:248c (rev 02)
00:1f.1 Class 0101: 8086:248a (rev 02)
00:1f.3 Class 0c05: 8086:2483 (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Class 0401: 8086:2485 (rev 02)
00:1f.6 Class 0703: 8086:2486 (rev 02)
01:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:0112 (rev b2)
02:01.0 Class 0200: 10b7:9200 (rev 78)
02:04.0 Class 0607: 1217:6972
03:00.0 Class 0200: 168c:001a (rev 01)

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I did the "lspci -n" and I have the one I need, but I noticed this at the bottom line of the driver description on your wiki link:

"Other: Works with WEP and WPA with TKIP cipher. May need iwpriv wlan0 ndis_reset when changing essid. "

Could the part I highlighted be what where the problem could be?

[cybertron]

You can try it. Just type "iwpriv wlan0 ndis_reset" as root in a terminal. I don't think that should keep wlan0 from showing up, but I don't really know what iwpriv does either as I don't use it.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

It didn't do anything. I went and reinstalled the driver( I'd switched it for the win98 to see if it made a difference) and it gave me this error:

Parse error in inf. Unable to find section W8100PCI.zerocfg

It gave me that error three times in a row. Later I noticed that when modprobe listed all the pathways to all the drivers[or modules(the ones with .ko.gz)] that the drivers listed in hardrake's config tool were among them, so I got ndiswrapper.ko.gz and copied it to the same directory. I thought that might put ndiswrapper or it's installed drivers on that hardrake config tool driver list, but it didn't. Next I started altering certain "alias" files(I forget what they were called) that loaded modules. I tried adding "alias ndiwrapper" and changeing the eth0 one to "alias eth0 ndiswrapper" but none of that worked or had any effect either. All I really need to do is get that hardrake config tool to list ndiswrapper or it's drivers with the rest on the list. Any other ideas?

[cybertron]

Okay, so to review. When you do "ndiswrapper -l" you get something that looks like the following (with your driver of course):
[root@Tuxtop /home/cybertron]# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
net5211 driver present, hardware present

And have you tried this driver from the wiki: http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=WL-138G

Let's see, what else? Make sure you've got the latest ndiswrapper (1.0, it appears), or possibly an older one if you get errors about your wireless tools being too old for the version you're running (although that hasn't caused problems for me). Try the latest and if it doesn't work and you get those errors try an older one I guess.

You can also try manually telling ndiswrapper to use a given driver for a given pciid. Try the -d switch. I guess it goes like "ndiswrapper -d pciid drivername". For mine that would be "ndiswrapper -d 03:00.0 net5211".

Well, gotta go for now. Hope something up there helps you.:)

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Now it tells me after I did this "ndiswrapper -d pciid drivername" , that that PCI is using that driver. Do they mean it is using it, or it is now starting to use that driver since I typed in that command. If that Pci is using the right driver, then why won't
hardrake see that, it still says "module:unknown". Keep in mind though, I still havn't got that other driver you suggested installed, I ran out of time yesterday so I kept useing the one on the disk.

[DimGR]

rmmod ndiswrapper

download the windows driver for your card
create a dir so you dont get lost

mkdir wlan
unzip windriver.exe -d /home/user/wlan
ndisrwapper -i filename.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper
echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules-2.6.XXX


iwlist wlan0 scan

[JayMan8081]

It's also possible that none of the Mandrake tools will ever see the wireless card as having a module installed. IRC when I did my ndiswrapper install back in MDK 9.2 it never showed up in the Mandrake GUIs and always told me that there wasn't a module associated with the card. In fact it does that currently with my WiFi card in my desktop. It uses the acx100 module that I had to install from source and the Mandrake GUIs will not let me configure it. I always have to use script files included with the source for the module.

[cybertron]

Originally posted by DimGR
echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules-2.6.XXX

The short version of that would be "ndiswrapper -m".:)

And my wireless card shows up as unrecognized in the MCC as well, so I don't believe that it will ever detect it properly.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

"In fact it does that currently with my WiFi card in my desktop."

"And my wireless card shows up as unrecognized in the MCC as well, so I don't believe that it will ever detect it properly."

If that's the case, are you able to connect to the internet through your GUI?( I mean connect through the browser) iwconfig and similar commands still says there are no wireless devices, is there a way of creating "wlan0"?

[cybertron]

wlan0 should show up in your network connections dropdown box, it will just have null for the driver. Unfortunately wlan0 isn't showing up at all for you, which I think is the root of the problem here. I seem to recall reading on the ndiswrapper site that they don't test the drivers that are included on the CD's, so if you haven't already I think the next step is to download the driver that was linked to on the wiki (I posted the URL above).

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Yes, I have downloaded that a while back in the thread. I did try to install it, but there is no .inf file. Is there another file extention that is in there that ndiswrapper will use? I'll start trying the others, but I have no idea if any will do.

Edit: Nope, none of those files will work. ndiswrapper doesn't say anything about drivers not having .inf files.

This is annoying. Is it possible that I just screwed it up in the install and managed to mess up the entire installation? I've read of that happening, but there it was immediatly noticeable.

[cybertron]

Well, it's possible that the install is just borked. If you do a "make uninstall" in the ndiswrapper source directory it will remove everything and then you can try starting from scratch (maybe even re-downloading the source, just in case). I'm downloading the driver right now to see if I can figure out how someone would have used it with no .inf files:confused:

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

No definitions were found for borked. I meant the entire mandrake 10.1 might be bad, I've had problems with it from the start. I can't even install tarballs, the tutorials on that look simple enough but there are always fatal problems. Generally, there is a lot in Mandrake that is just simply "broken". I alway figured it was my fault and I messed it up in the installation, but I can't tell.
I've scoured the man page for ndiswrapper(it's short), and -i seems to be the only way to install. I've tried pointing it to the other files in there(setup.exe, etc.) and none worked.
I'm partly greatfull for this problem, in trying to solve this, I've learned a lot about linux that I'd've never gotten around to otherwise.

[cybertron]

Hmm, are you using 10.1 Community by any chance? That was a pretty screwed up distribution. Mandrake should be ashamed of it. Official has been somewhat better, although I've still found a few of the lesser-used packages that flat-out don't work.

BTW, borked is a colloquialism referring to a former Supreme Court justice candidate by the name Bork. Through some funny political maneuvering he ended up not being appointed even though he was expected to be a shoe-in. So technically it doesn't apply here, but it's frequently been extended to computer-related uses. Nice to know I learned something useful(?) in my polisci classes:D

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

The disk says "10.1 Official", so it is official; though for a second there I thought that could'v been the problem. I think I'm going to have to redo my hard drives anyway. In knowing this I have/(just opened the website) looked into several different distros to replace mandrake: Mepis, Xandros, and unbuntu(already downloaded). What do you recommend?


Your history of the work "borked" is interesting. Funny how words' meaning change and evolve.

[cybertron]

Well, as the only distros I've ever used extensively are Mandrake and Gentoo, I'm not really in a position to say for sure which you should try. I would say check out the .iso Confused forum and read some of the threads there. There have been one or two about which distro is the best for a given purpose;)

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

No! The disk Lied! I was installing ubuntu on my second hard disk and it identified the other OS's. Omong them was Mandrake 10.1 COMMUNITY. The disk label lied!

Now that I have ubuntu though, why can't it access the other parts of the computer, specifically, the XP side where the new version(downloaded) of ndiswrapper is? I can't access su either, why?

Edit:
On second thought, those questions are probably for another thread, and you mentioned only using mandrake and gentoo. When I can get ndiswrapper working on unbuntu, I'll just go through what I already tried. It says ndiswrapper is installed, why wont it work now?(even if it's old)

[cybertron]

Interesting. I wonder if the disk label lied, or if Mandrake forgot to update the partitioning utility when they released Official:)

I have no idea how to figure out for sure which one you actually had, but I suppose it's not a big deal now.

As far as your other issues go, I'd guess that maybe Ubuntu for some reason didn't compile in support for NTFS to the kernel or just didn't add the NTFS drives to fstab. The former would have been foolish on their part and would require a recompile, but the latter is easy enough to fix. Just google around and you'll find an example for what to add to fstab.

For su you probably need to add yourself to the wheel group. Some distros won't let you use su if you're not.

But like you said those questions are for a different thread, so if that doesn't help you should probably start a new one (if you haven't already:)).

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

OK, now I installed a new ndiswrapper rpm on ubuntu and I got this message when trying to "modprobe ndiswrapper":
FATAL: Error inserting ndiswrapper (/lib/modules/2.6.8.1-3-386/kernel/drivers/net/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper.ko): Invalid module format


What does this mean? I did install this ndiswrapper with alien, I don't know if that makes a difference.

[cybertron]

Hmm, is there a reason you're using RPM's on a Debian-based system? I'd strongly recommend giving apt-get a try instead. I haven't used it, but it's supposed to be terrific (and if it's anything like portage for Gentoo, which I think it is, then it is terrific:)). What it sounds like is that the module from the RPM is not compatible with your kernel. Maybe it was compiled for a different version or something.

Also, I think in this case it might be just as easy to compile from source since it has to build the appropriate kernel module anyway. Might want to give that a try instead.

[JayMan8081]

Did a version of ndiswrapper come with Ubuntu? If so did you try using that version? Ubuntu seems to be on the cutting edge when it comes to package selection so it wouldn't surprise me if they had a fairly recent version of ndiswrapper already included.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

There is no version already there, I thought there was when searching the packages, but that turned out to be the name of the search I made, not at all a package.

I was using rpm's because it looked like you had to download them directly to linux in order to install them, but I still can't connect on linux, I'm using xp for the internet. Furthermore, I'm not too fond of things not rpm since the procedure for installing things like tarballs has never worked for me(looks simple enough in the tutorials), granted, that was on Mandrake 10.1 community and that whole system was like code carrion.

[cybertron]

Give compiling them from source another shot. 10.1 Community was just flat-out broken when it came to compiling, so you should have no trouble under Ubuntu.

Also, the reason that there is nothing in apt-get for ndiswrapper could be that Ubuntu uses its own repositories instead of the standard Debian ones (from what I understand anyway). I think there are some threads floating around about how to setup the full Debian repositories on Ubuntu and if not there must be something on Google:)

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I just don't get this command, it has never worked and is why I could never previously use tarballs.

./configure

It always tells me "no such file or directory"
Is this just one of those things I should have known by now?

[cybertron]

Did you cd into the directory that the source unpacked to before the ./configure? If you do an ls you should see a file named configure with executable permissions.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

nope, no configure. Come to think of it, I'v downloaded dozens of tarballs, and none of them ever once worked, exept one... I just kept clicking on all the 'Makefile" files, and when running the command in that directory, the program worked; but that was a different program. I've never seen this configure file in any tarball I've ever tried to use.

[JayMan8081]

According to this site (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/Installation?PHPSESSID=f5baa4f3eac45953f9838e03b15 dbd48) you can just type 'make' and then 'make install' You don't need to ./configure step. At least according to the Wiki. Maybe try skipping the ./configure step and just start with make.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I tried that, a lot. It spewed out a bunch of errors I forget what they were though. I'll look again tomarrow.

[XiaoKJ]

ubuntu is debian based.

debian:~# apt-cache search ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper-source - Source for the ndiswrapper linux kernel module
ndiswrapper-utils - Userspace utilities for ndiswrapper

apt-cache search will search the database for you.

so just
apt-get install ndiswrapper-source ndiswrapper-utils

then you will have ndiswrapper's files in there nicely for you.
cd /usr/src
tar -xvzf ndiswrapper-source.tar.gz
cd modules/ndiswrapper
debian/rules binary-modules KSRC=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build
dpkg -i ../ndiswrapper-modules-*.deb
Then proceed with installing the specific windows files.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

root@ubuntu:/usr/src # apt-get install /usr/src/ndiswrapper-1.1rc4.tar.gz
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package

This is driving me nuts. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to type the path to files called "ndiswrapper-source" and "ndiswrapper-utils", or you meant me to type the path just to these directories.

[cybertron]

I don't think that it will let you install a tar.gz file using apt-get. If you do the apt-cache search thing above does it list any packages in the repository for ndiswrapper?

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

"ndiswrapper - NdisWrapper binary loader utility"

That's all it says.

[cybertron]

Try "apt-get install ndiswrapper" then. It could be that Ubuntu simplified things down a bit so there aren't two different packages for it.

If that doesn't work for some reason, try the source install again and post the error messages that you get. It might help figure out what's going wrong.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

"root@ubuntu:~ # apt-get install ndiswrapper
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
ndiswrapper is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded."

I went ahead and tried ndiswrapper again and it seems to have done a little bit better. The modprobe thing seems to have worked this time.
On ndiswrapper -m, it said it added it's alias wlan0 to the /etc/..../modprob.d/ndiswrapper file. It did, but it still won't show up under iwconfig, or anywhere else.

EDIT:
I'll just start a new thread for the narrowed down problem. Can I, should I, do that? Now the problem has been narrowed down to this d*mn missing wlan0, is there a way to create it manually and have it actually work?

[sparkles43]

ever fix your wireless problem? did you start a new thread. I just happened to see it and know your pain, but I finally got mine to work. let me know. Ted

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

What kind of card did you have?


Nope, it won't work,but since then I've got two new cards(D-link DWL-520B, and now a HWP54G hawking tech.). I got the hawking tech. one because it was supposed to have the prismGT chipset, but it has Ralink2500 instead. It's supposed to have a driver for it from the ralink site and another elsewhere but they didn't work well. And now that I re-installed slack and upgraded to kernel 2.6.11.2, it wont install them again(I get a make error (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=139760) ).

I fell victim to the wireless manufacturer's conspiricy to fool us by playing "musical chairs" with their card's chipsets.
It's driving me nuts, I'm trying to return or exchange the card to the website under the condition that (if I exchange it) they give me the old one with PrismGT, but they have not yet replied, even though they are supposed to within twenty four hours(it's been a few days now).

[sparkles43]

OK reading your posts it didn't really seem like you grasped the concept of how the nswrapper works. I didn't either but here is 3 three components that I found that I needed to make work to make my card work.
1: do some google searching for your wireless card and linux and make sure you load into the right KERNEL version when you Linux operating system loads. (I went in circles forever and although I had the correct Kernel on my system it was booting into another and then once I made sure I booted into the right Kernel it worked. I actually burst into tears since I had been working on it so long)

2. Make sure you have the NSWRAPPER installed

3. Once the NSWRAPPER is installed you need to then load the wireless card module (aka driver) that you can get from the manufacturers website or locate with a linux / wifi card type search.

"LSPCI" command will show you all the hardware on your computer. Your exact wireless card type should be listed here.
then once you load the driver use a
"IWCONFIG" command. If the driver is successfully loaded the IWCONFIG command will show the device is loaded and ready to go. Do a IPCONFIG command. See how the device is listed up. Well that similar to how you will see the WIFI card listed if the module loaded
also, try a DMESG to see the error messages you are getting and google search for the resolutions.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Your outline makes things much clearer. I'm pretty sure I've got the right kernel loaded, but you may be right that it could be the wrong one, I can't imagine that because I did what these people did. (http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/lofiversion/index.php/t11484.html) It worked exactly like they said it would, but could this stupid make error thing be a problem with their method?
I can't actually install ndiswrapper or any package yet because of that error.

It'll be real disappointing if those people's method is flawed and I have to go back to the old kernel. I'll try that when I get around to it.(tonite, tomarrow?)

[sparkles43]

keep me posted. Let me know...what kind of wifi card do you have and what version of Linux are you running?

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I'm back to DWL-g520 b2, I returned the hwp54g.
I'm on slackware 10.1 kenel 2.6.11.2. I had more written, but the post never made it up for some reason. The DWL card is supposed to have native support with ubuntu, but it didn't and niether does slack.

[sparkles43]

OK for your card..i don't think you go the NSWRAPPER route. You need to install MAD WIFI. http://madwifi.sourceforge.net
go there and get it installed. Then after you get that go get the driver. Lemme know once you get MAD WIFI installed and I'll help you with the next step. I do see that that card will work with Linux. Don't give up. You'll feel like a cool guy once you conquer this. Trust me.

[sparkles43]

D-Link 802.11g DWL-G520 PCI Atheros Mad WiFi
Tx power 13-18; 152-bit WEP; driver available at: http://madwifi.sourceforge.net

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-24851.html

hope that helps

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I've tried MADWIFI before, I couldn't get it to get a responce from the router, I could ping it but not dhcp it. I forget the exact dhcp command I used, it was a few weeks ago I was doing that with this card. From the routers side, was nothing -- it couldn't see my computer(while on linux, it does on XP). I've tried nearly everything, STORMPROOF and several others with similar cards have run out of ideas too, just don't know what's wrong. I'm not sure I want to waste anyone else's time on this unless you have another suggestion.

[kwennemar]

One of the reasons I have switched to the Ubuntu distro is their wealth of documentation.
The simple starter guide is:

http://www.ubuntuguide.org/

users forum:

http://ubuntuforums.org/

How to for ndiswrapper:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HowToSetUpNdiswrapper

You will also need to install your own firewall. I use firestarter since it is simple to configure.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I was on ubuntu when I first tried this card and I did find all the documentation ok, but you know when they say "once you go Slack, you never go back", they mean it.

[psych-major]

Originally posted by Omnscnt(Sortof)
I'm back to DWL-g520 b2, I returned the hwp54g.
I'm on slackware 10.1 kenel 2.6.11.2. I had more written, but the post never made it up for some reason. The DWL card is supposed to have native support with ubuntu, but it didn't and niether does slack.

By chance I discovered that Mepis (http://www.mepis.org/) supports my D-Link DWL-G650 card. You might give their live CD a boot, just for fun.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

'K, I'll try that, I also need to try fedora while I'm at it. (I just bought an old server with fedora and I'm going to beuwolf it, I can't help but brag, sorry).

While I'm at it, I may as well try it with suse too, if Mepis doesn't work, and if that won't work I'm just going to but the smc2802w. They actually offer official linux drivers.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Holy strippers! It works! You were right! Mepis did it with no trouble at all! I guess I'll have to install it on the hard drive next to XP, Mandrake, and Slackware. :D

This will do for now, but eventually I want to get it running on Slackware.

[psych-major]

Cool!
Mepis is a solid distro.

I wonder if you can take the driver it compiled and somehow install to Slack?

[blu.gecko]

I am running ubuntu 5.0.4 and I was having the same issues with ndiswrapper, here how I got mine to work.....


installed ndiswrapper-utils
sudo ndiswrapper - i /drivername.inf
ndiswrapper - l
driver supported, hardware supported
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

then I wen to the network section and had to activate the card.

then

sudo ndiswrapper - m

then you will have to install a wireless application like netapplet or gtkwifi

hope this helps, it took me 2 weeks to get this down pat.

blu.gecko

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Depends on what you define as "solid". It works and all, but there have been a lot more catches than Slack, and it's slower than mollassas in an igloo --evan on reiserfs. I may be able to speed it up on my own but it's nice to be online in linux.

I wonder if you can take the driver it compiled and somehow install to Slack?

That had occured to me, got no idea just yet. Wouldn't that just involve just copying the driver's files to the proper places in Slack, or might it be a seperate package somewhere on the disk?

[cybertron]

I think you won't be able to just copy the files over unless both systems use exactly the same kernel. You can try it though. The worst that will happen is that it will say it can't insert the module.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Nope, the kernels are not the same. I'll just have to try to do it manually the right way.

[cybertron]

Do you know whether MEPIS uses MadWifi or ndiswrapper as the driver? If it's ndiswrapper you might be able to pull the .inf file it uses over to Slack and get it working that way.

[psych-major]

The Mepis live CD just works, without needing my Windows driver, so I assume it uses madwifi, but I have never managed to gather the *****ion to check.

Another distro that works with my D-Link card, and definitely uses madwifi, is Auditor Security Linux (http://new.remote-exploit.org/index.php/Auditor_main), but it's not exactly a general purpose distro...:rolleyes:

[cybertron]

You can find out which it uses with lsmod. Just see whether the ndiswrapper or ath_pci module was loaded.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

It's ath_pci, that's MADWIFI isn't it? How could they have gotten it to work right with MEPIS? Was magic involved? After all that I tried with it I can't imagine what they did differently.

[psych-major]

This has been driving me nuts too, but I haven't had time to figure out what they're getting right and that I'm missing.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

If you scroll on down on this site I found, there is an article that may be of help. I havn't had time to evaluate it yet though.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3247181060.html

[psych-major]

Would you believe I'm online with my D-Link DWL-G650 Xtreme G wireless card and madwifi!?! I can hardly believe it, and I'm not exactly sure how I got it working...

I had some spare time tonight, so I fired up the laptop and did this:

ifconfig ath0 up
edited /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf and added my router info and changed rate from 108M to auto
ran /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless
ran dhcpcd ath0

viola!! I'm online. This is such coolness I need to find a way to celebrate.

Now if I could just get ACPI and gtk-gnutella working...

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Now if I could just get ACPI and gtk-gnutella working...

I think gnutella is a wierd cross between penut butter and fudge.

What exactly did you edit into /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf? I thought it was supposed to pick up router information automatically.

[Icarus]

Originally posted by Omnscnt(Sortof)
I think gnutella is a wierd cross between penut butter and fudge. Unlike giFT which is a wierd cross between gravy and chocolate :p

[psych-major]

Originally posted by Omnscnt(Sortof)
What exactly did you edit into /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf? I thought it was supposed to pick up router information automatically.

Added my ESSID
Changed the rate from 108M to auto
Changed my WEP key from ascii to hex
Added a call to rc.wireless atho to rc.local
Added dhcpcd ath0 to rc.local

Now when I boot, I automagically connect to my wireless network at anywhere from 36Mbps to 54Mbps.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Nope, still nothin.

Changed my WEP key from ascii to hex
Added a call to rc.wireless atho to rc.local
Added dhcpcd ath0 to rc.local

Is the wep key set to ascii by default? How does one "add a call" and what is "a call"?

[psych-major]

The WEP key is hex by default, but I was using ascii on the router and trying to connect that way from the laptop. In iwconfig, you specify an ascii WEP key like this: key="S:your_key"

a "call" is a reference in a script to another script. I added a reference to rc.wireless in my rc.local script, so that it would run automagically at boot time.

I still can't believe I got it working! It's so nice to take my Dell Latitude out to the patio and have 4 hours of full wireless access and Slackware!

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

ok.... I'll look into that later, but latly I've been trying for a new angle. I've been looking for a kernel with support already in it. I tried the latest from kernel.org, but it didn't have it and it didn't take anyway (I couldn't find /vmlinuz for a command in those particular instructions). There is a kernel 3.0 at either the hacker's army or packet storm, but I forget witch. Do you know of any places that develop kernels other than kernel,org? (other than the ones I found so far, or have I embarked on a wild goose chase?)

[psych-major]

I don't know of any other kernel sources. Are you still on Slack with the D-Link card?

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Yeah, still slack and D-link. I havn't yet tried some of the things you mentioned before.

[cybertron]

Hmm, I don't really see you having much luck finding an alternate kernel. The problem is that these drivers are proprietary and have to be reverse-engineered - a messy prospect at best - so they tend not to get included in the mainstream kernel.

[psych-major]

I still think the easiest solution is to pay the man his $20 and get driverloader. At least then you get a human on the other end of the phone if you have trouble getting it running.

From my experience with madwifi, though, it's worth another try. I got it running on my third attempt with kernel 2.4.29 bareacpi.i in a fresh install of Slackware 10.1.

What gave me hope was booting Mepis Live CD with the 2.4 kernel and having their version of madwifi work out of the gate on my card. I knew if they could do it, then I could too!

[cybertron]

Yeah, but didn't he just start another thread about how ath0 mysteriously died in Mepis too now? At this point I'd almost start looking at maybe your motherboard or the PCI slot or something (this was a PCI card, wasn't it? I forget:)). It's just that you've seen some really odd behavior out of stuff that a fair number of other people have working.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I got it running on my third attempt with kernel 2.4.29 bareacpi.i in a fresh install of Slackware 10.1.

I can't even count how many times I've tried it. Now it wont work in Mepis (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=815296#post815296) either. No, I've tried driverloader.



Yeah, but didn't he just start another thread about how ath0 mysteriously died in Mepis too now? At this point I'd almost start looking at maybe your motherboard or the PCI slot or something (this was a PCI card, wasn't it? I forget). It's just that you've seen some really odd behavior out of stuff that a fair number of other people have working.


I concure! That's got to be it! I'm so sick and tired of this thing fauling up that I would gladly pay hundreds for a new board! And yes, it is a PCI. This is just hapening at random.

[cybertron]

Before doing anything drastic, have you tried a different slot? It could be an IRQ conflict or something too, and changing the slot might get it assigned a different one. It's a stretch, but I think something similar happened to me a long time ago.

[psych-major]

I agree on switching PCI slots, if ypu have that option. Also, NewEgg has a neat MSI ATX motherboard for about $50.

At work, my boss was having a ton of trouble with a D-Link PCMCIA wireless card on a Sony vaio and WinXP. We ended up getting a USB wifi adapter and now it works great.

The point is, sometimes it's not the hardware itself, but the interaction with other hardware.

Or, you could get a really long CAT5 cable! :rolleyes:

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Before doing anything drastic, have you tried a different slot?

I've done that before, but mayby I'll give it another shot. It was a while ago that I tried that last.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I'm on in slack! I can't believe it! I did it!:D

I used "dhcpcd ath0" after installing wireless_tools.27.pre26.tar.gz and madwifi-cvs-current.tar.gz and of coarse, entering in my info. and then Konqueror worked for some reason!

Now to get this dang mouse scroll button working... couldn't be that hard.:rolleyes:

[psych-major]

Congratulations!!

Now for the mouse, do this:

As root, edit /etc/X11/xorg.config

Find the section that looks like this:
# *********************************
# Core Pointer's InputDevice section
# *********************************
And edit it to like like this:

# Identifier and driver

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"

Syntax is crucial here.
Once you change and save it, reboot and enjoy your wheelmouse.

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

It worked too! Man, I am on a roll today!

I actually tried adding Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" as suggested by some other site, but it didn't have any effect alone.

Thanks for your help!

[psych-major]

Any time!

Now do a backup before something breaks!!

[cybertron]

:)

This has to have been one of the longest running help threads on the site!

[psych-major]

I'm just glad it had a happy ending!

Mark it solved, quick!

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

Mark it solved, quick!

Whaaa? Can(how do) I do that? Or is that a mod job?