HOWTO: Ndiswrapper Wireless Setup

cdeberry · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 48

Read a few of the above posts and seems people are having the same problems with setting essid in iwconifg..

iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid

of

iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid commit

Neither set the essid correclty... Has anyone been able to find a fix for this?

Nuuul · Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 4:04 pm Post subject:

Works great on my Toshiba Tecra 8000, with a 2.6.3 kernel.

With the Asus WL-300G and the Asus WL-100G PCMCIA(broadcom 94306 chipset for those who didn't knew).
Followed the howto step by step, it's working now, but I have to assign my WEP key via iwconfig, like: iwconfig wlan0 essid (myessid) (128-bit hex key), then a net.wlan0 start (where it's configured for DHCP, via the Gentoo router, offcourse

).

Now I'm looking for a way to automagically configure the wlan card, when pcmcia-cs starts. Tried different settings, but it just doesn't handle the card as a wlan card (Well, maybe it does, maybe someone can tell me

).

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

BTW, if anyone is fighting with the irq's on this tecra, just add pci=noacpi pci=usepirqmask both to the bootloader (It spammed the logs with errors, without this for about 3 megs

).
Also got sound (opl3sa-2) perfectly working on the Tecra, but that's a long story. Just ask me if you need help

[edit] Okay, I just whacked the init script by just adding the iwconfig command between start-stop part, works automatically now [/edit]

wwc210 · n00b Joined: 06 Mar 2004 Posts: 5

Hey. Everything seems to be working for everyone but me. : (

I have a Truemobile 1400. I am using the newest CVS of ndiswrapper. My kernel is vanilla 2.6.3 from kernel.org. Wireless extensions were enabled; SMP was disabled.

There was an earlier howto that involved ./parseinfo and ndiswrapper. However, when I ran ndiswrapper, it kicked back a "Permission denied." I was running as root (I know I shouldn't) and the module was not loaded. (lsmod returned nothing.) However, I can both load and unload ndiswrapper.

Can anyone who had the Truemobile 1400 working please post *exactly* what they did? The CVS and everything? It might help if you posted the config files.

Moderators might want to start a new thread: one for the new ndiswrapper and one for the old one. Perhaps the different hardwares should be separated as well.

Thanks.

wwc210 · n00b Joined: 06 Mar 2004 Posts: 5

There was a new version of ndiswrapper (0.5) that was released on March 7, 2004. For some strange reason, the version of ndiswrapper pull from the CVS today did not work.

Here's a mini-HOWTO for ndiswrapper on the Dell Truemobile 1400 with the Broadcom chip. The vendor pciID is 14e4, and the chip pciID is 4324.

Compile your kernel. I got it working with 2.6.3 vanilla. Nevertheless, it is in the documentation that at least 2.4.22 is required. Compile WITHOUT SMP support. You MUST compile in wireless (non-hamradio) support even if your chip is not explicitly supported there. You must also get the .INF and .SYS windows driver files. For this chip, download the Dell driver and decompress it. The file name is bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf.

Make the directory /lib/windrivers. Copy the above files into that directory. Download ndiswrapper-0.5.tar. Uncompress it. (tar -xvf ndiswrapper-0.5.tar) Change into directory ndiswrapper. Follow the INSTALL there to the letter. (Literally.) I could cut and paste the information here but that would be a waste of time.

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 620

umm i followed your advice to the letter but when i get to the loadndisdriver i always get the useage crap even after filling out the required information..

Superfly · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 34

I've got it working on a Dell D500 with the Intel Pro mini-pci card.

For those of you having troubles associating with your AP... for some reason with the ndiswrapper drivers I've noticed that it's important to sets the proper encryption key first before trying to associate at all with the AP.

So instead of:

iwconifg essid myap key mykey

do:

iwconfig key mykey essid myap

It seems to only work this way with my laptop and an Orinoco Wavelan AP2000 with wep enabled. But if I put in an orinoco pcmcia card in I can set the essid first and then the key and have no problem...

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 620

oops forgot this stuff.
this is the card i am useing

snowmoon · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2002 Posts: 64 Location: Albany,NY USA

you are trying to use ndiswrapper 0.5 with instuctions for 0.4 ... the way it works totally changes between these two versions... go bakc and read the INSTALL

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 620

doh... thank you

edit: ok it installs alright but it won't take any changes i pass to it. like essid and keys

damianfrancis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 120

I have the broadcom 94306 chipset, and I downloaded ndiswrapper 0.5, First I was apparently using the instructions for 0.4, but after reading the thread through to figure out why it wasn't working I looked at the install doc that came with 0.5. I installed the windows driver according to that doc, and I have gotten to the point that dmesg hs the following three lines to pertain to ndiswrapper:

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 620

damianfrancis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 120

Yes I think it is. Are you able actually use the wifi. Cause I seem to not be able to ping any thing not the net and not my router, but when I open firefox it seems to be able to load http://www.mozilla.org after a long time but nothing else seems to be happening. well now it is not loading mozilla.org either. How can I check to see if it is getting a signal?
_________________
This post has been brought to you by The damianfactor!

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 620

i can't even contact the accses point or change any values. the mac address for the accses point is set to all F's the mac address for broadcast mode.

damianfrancis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 120

Ok my wifi seems to be working...no it is working. I have posted the problems I had above so I am just going to mention what I did that finally got it working. First I realized that the alteration I had made to my kernel about wifi support had not been installed because /boot was not mounted so the new kernel was not accepting the ndiswrapper correctly. I also enable some stuff in the kernel for general pcmcia networking, cause I think I read something about that as well. But once I was booting the right kernel I was able to make the changes like mode and essid. Then I did this

mariourk · Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2004 6:44 pm Post subject:

My systems seems to get unstable when the ndiswrapper module is loaded.
When I run the 2.4 kernel, my system will crash as soon I do:

damianfrancis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 120

Yes I have also noticed this, actually it happend when I was trying to shut down the interface for eth0 to test and see if wlan0 was functioning. But since I A. haven't had to do that any more since I took loading of eth0 out of the default runlevel. and B. and I haven't since the first time used the

mariourk · Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2004 10:22 pm Post subject:

The 2.4 kernel will crash when I do:

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 620

viperlin · Veteran Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 1316 Location: UK

i got minimal sucess trying this with a Realtek 8180 driver, it displayed the Nic but i could not set essid or change mode from Auto, so it was pretty useless.

i'm currently working n finding a replacement for linuxant, i have like 27 days left on my licnece for it, itf push comes to shove i'll have to either buy the thing or run it in 1999.

G.N.A. · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Mar 2004 Posts: 81

I am having problems trying to the the modprobe ndiswrapper command to work. Please take a look at the following post if you think you can help.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=149198

I am getting a:

damianfrancis · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Aug 2003 Posts: 120

This may be a silly question, but can you load other modules G.N.A.? or do you have everything built into the kernel. Make sure you have loadable module support in your kernel.

viperlin: what was the readout when you tried to change the mode and essid with iwconfig?
_________________
This post has been brought to you by The damianfactor!

G.N.A. · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Mar 2004 Posts: 81

I found the solution in another not directly related post:

allucid · Veteran Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 1314 Location: atlanta

centrino WEP is now supported in the current CVS version fyi.

it still acts a little iffy though...

Nuuul · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 12:22 pm Post subject:

Upgraded to 0.6, but I got a lot of output and some depscan errors

Offcourse I did a make clean every time, but now I've tried 0.4 because that one worked without any problems for me....

Now I'm still getting the depscan errors that it can't find the net.wlan0 in the started directory, with 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6. Tried a lot of editting in the config files, even re-emerged baselayout..........nothing

But the thing is......everything still works as it should, it's just I'm getting the damn depscan errors (same as ShallowCorporateRaider).

Hopefully someone can help me here

ShallowCorporateRaider · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 9:27 pm Post subject:

Ah, Nuuul, thanks for mentioning my depscan errors again. I thought everyone had forgotten about them. :wink:

Seriously, can anybody have pity on poor Nuuul and me, and point us in the right direction?
_________________
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion. -- G. K. Chesterton