Can this be done?
I already installed the minimal CD on my laptop, but I only have a PCMCIA wireless card for internet access. It's a Netgear WG511 and it's not even being detected by minimal debian.
What do I need to do, to get it working, and running wireless so i get use apt?

Check if the kernel has native drivers for it. I'm not sure if there are native drivers but you can google them up, search in the HCL here on linuxquestions (follow the link in the menu) or search the wireless forums.

You can also install ndiswrapper. I assume that either way you'll have to install from the command line. Ndiswrapper is small enough to fit on a floppy. After that you can use apt. And well as it says, it's debian minimal so it won't have to many extras people might not need. That way people can start clean and only install what they need. So that's why it's "not even" detected.

well, someone on the other board said that prism54 drivers come with the kernel. Yet some say that only certain versions of my card are supported by prism54. So should i just go with ndiswrapper?
How do i check if prism54 drivers are even installed on this bare system?

Didn't you modprobe it yet? Try "modprobe prism54" if that works you should get no errors and a wireless entry when you run "iwconfig".

Also make sure you have wireless-tools installed. I am running a Netgear WG311T with the Atheros chipset, and it was not detected by a minimal install. lspci showed the card, but ifconfig did not. After installing wireless-tools, iwconfig saw my card.
Remember that the same card will have different chipsets, so while one card uses madwifi, another might use ndiswrapper. WG311 v1 uses prism, v2 is not compatible, and vT uses atheros, but all of them are WG311 cards. I do not know the ls command for the pc card slot, but for pci, I ran lspci. and it displayed the card and the chipset. With that, I knew which drivers to use.

Good luck,

i'd say download the Debian 3.1 installer and see if your card is detected without a problem first off.

get the net installer here http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

I couldn't get wireless-tools:
when I ran "apt-get install wireless-tools"
it gave me some kind of error about wireless-tools possible being deprecated or some sort error.

So my card is a V2 but it's made in China, does that mean that it will not work with prism54?

I also tried using ndis wrapper, when i installed it, i checked the drivers in the ndiswrapper and ng511 was listed, but it said that driver was invalid. Any ideas?

which version of Debian are you using? i'm using 3.1 (sarge) wherein wireless-tools is one of the core packages. i really think that if you just start off by installing sarge, you'll be good to go. get the sarge install disc iso from the link in my previous post.

See the threads "How to Activate Wireless" and "Startup Scripts" for some information on the WG511 PC card. And I will be posting some additional details this morning. But, I think only the V1 card, made in Taiwan, uses the prism54 driver. In any case, the installer, Sarge, 2.6.8 kernel, does not recognize the card, so a netinst is not possible. I used my laptop's built-in ethernet port to get the system installed and then worked on getting the WG511 wireless card working.

Good luck, jimbo

I'd second (or third!) the idea to try Debian 3.1 . I never had any luck getting my Netgeat MA401 to work during the install with 3.0x, but 3.1 brought it straight up. It seems to include a lot more wireless modules during the base install, maybe as it's based off the 2.6.x kernel if you select it from the boot menu for the install. It did have problems with the encryption, but after I figured that out it worked fine.

I'm sorry i didn't specify, but i'm using Sarge net-install version, the newest one available from debian.org. However it seems that wireless-tools are having problems still, like I described above in a post. So I'm going to reinstall it and try ndiswrapper again. Where can i get instructions on how to get ndiswrapper to work with WG511?

My understanding is that using the wrapper is very difficult. Why don't you follow the details in the two threads that I referenced? I had no problems installing wireless-tools in my Sarge 3.1r0a installation. My Netgear WG511 wireless PC card works perfectly. Everything starts automatically at boot.

Good luck, jimbo

Ndiswrapper isn't hard.

But if there are native drivers out there it's better to use those. And as jimbo-62 has it working like that I'd say try that way.

Which version wg511 netgear card is it?
Read over this post for the reason I ask.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=295200

Brian1

It seems like it's version 2 (v2), however, it's made in China, and as I understand chinese version doesn't work with prism54. I looked at those posts jimbo, but i couldn't get prism54 to recognize the card. After modprobing prism54 and "stuffing" the firmware, i still wasn't getting any power light on the card. So I'm assuming that ndiswrapper is my only choice.