Tuesday, January 6, 2009

NDISwrapper Installation




This video is courtesy emiemi2.

Native drivers for Unix and Linux are not available for many wireless network adapters, as manufacturers supply neither drivers nor the information required to write them.NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Microsoft Windows drivers for wireless network devices (cards, USB modems, and routers), on Unix-like operating systems, for devices sharing the same architecture only, namely either x86 or x86-64. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs, and dynamically linking the driver to this implementation.

This video illustrates the installation and use of NDISwrapper.

Linux Shells by Example

11 comments:

  1. This worked fantastically for me... until the final two steps.

    Typing in "ndiswrapper -m" didn't appear to do anything, and typing "ifconfig wlan0 up" gave me the following error:

    "wlan0: ERROR while getting interface flags: no such device"

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  2. You know ndisgtk will also work fine.. and its a lot easier..after installing the windows drivers do a:
    #depmod -a
    #modeprobe ndiswrapper
    thats it!

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  3. So sad. Stayed with you until the end. After typing ndiswrapper -m, it said that the update command has been depreciatiated and should not be used. ifconfig wlan up errored with flag error. just typing ifconfig wlan0 showed the correct mac for the wireless card, but will not respond to "up" command.

    But, your video was the best resource so far. So thanks for that much, just need a little more help.

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  4. Thanks for the video, things were going well until about 4 minutes and 50 seconds, where the make command is used.

    When I do the make command, I get the following:

    make -C driver
    make[1]: Entering directory `/home/Martin/Wireless/ndiswrapper-1.54/driver'
    Makefile:23: *** Kernel tree not found - please set KBUILD to configured kernel. Stop.
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/Martin/Wireless/ndiswrapper-1.54/driver'
    make: *** [all] Error 2

    He talks about the standard development libraries and the like, when I installed Linux, I put in all the development bits I could find, but no joy.

    Can any one shine some light on what I'm doing wrong or what else I need to set up??

    I'm using Limpus Linux 9.5, if that is any help for my problem and to say I was a newbie, would be a bit of an over statement. So VERY simple instructions please!!

    Thanks loads

    Martin

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  5. Everything worked perfectly after I blacklisted the ssb driver listed after typing "ndiswrapper -l". After that everything was perfect. Thank you so much for your time and effort.

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  6. Not quite perfect. Two reboots after I got my wireless working my card wouldn't show up in lspci. Not in the system on the harddrive or multiple live cd's. Final solution was to switch card to known good pci slot. I hope it doesn't happen again, I'm running low on pci slots it hasn't been in. Still a wonderful how to.

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  7. Did I miss something, or should you have a "./configure" before the "make"?

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  8. how can I be sure if I have the developer packages? make command not recognized in my debian distribution (one of the last stable versions), regards Gerardo

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  9. I started again from a fresh install of Red Hat. I didn't need to use this process and I have a intel wireless device. I just downloaded from intel the relevent microcode zip (containing a .ucode file) and place this ucode file into /usr/firmware. Started the NetworkManager and everything was okay. It would appear the driver was already installed - I just needed the ucode microcode.

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  10. Actually I think it was /lib/firmware...

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