Hello I am a newbie but I love my mandrake 10.2 x86_64. I am running it on an AMD mobile Athlon 64 (e-machine). When I tried to use ndiswrapper for my Broadcom 54g MaxPerformance 802.11g it through up an error message. It reads "Unexpected error has happened: insmod'ing module ndiswrapper failed at /usr/lib/libDrakX/modules.pm line 66" The default driver it comes up with before I tried anything is BCM 94306 802.11g NIC

I desperately need to connect to my wireless inorder to keep using Linux. Can anybody help?

Thanks for helping and keeping it simple. I haven't even sucessfully installed a program manually

JA

If the Broadcom card you have isn't embedded in the device, I would return it and get a better card from a company that actually supports Linux like Ralink.

Oh and if you're using the AMD64 version of Linux you'll probably need the Windows 64-bit driver, I really doubt ndiswrapper would load a 32-bit driver into a 64-bit kernel.

It won't work. Been there, tried that . The 64-bit driver works fine though. Try http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=186

IMO if you need to use something like ndiswrapper to get the thing working it doesn't work fine and should be replaced. There are better and cheaper cards that work just fine with proper Linux drivers.

So, I should break open the case for my HP Pavilion and break the Braoadcom chips off the motherboard? Sorry. Its built-in.

No, but nothing's stopping you from spending $20 on a decent card.

Mine is built in too; on my mobile athlon 64 bit (e-machine laptop who, by the way has awesome customer service!!) I had to replace the "card" once. I unscrewed a cap on the bottom of the laptop, popped it out (like it was a PCI card) and snapped off the two nodes that were wired for the antena.

It seems that if I could replace this "embedded" card so easily, i could replace it with a Linux friendly one. I just do not know what kind (type) of "card" this would be. Any help?

JA

If I had to guess, I would say it's mini-PCI. But I haven't had any experience with that type of card.

how do I install this driver? Please keep it simple - thanks - JA

Assuming you are running an x86_64 distro of Linux, grab the windows drivers from the link in my post. Download ndiswrapper from Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/). Unpack the ndiswrapper file (tar -xzvf <filename>) and cd into the directory that's created. Issue the command "make". If you don't see anything that looks foreboding (words like ERROR or WARNING), you can do a "make install". You will either need to be root (su -) or be in the sudoers file (sudo make install). If you su to root, you will need to change back to the directory where you unpacked ndiswrapper before doing the "make install."

If I remember correctly, the command is "ndiswrapper -m" to add the correct instructions to /etc/modprobe.conf to load the ndiswrapper module. You then need to feed ndiswrapper the Windoze drivers you downloaded from the link in my previous post. The file is zipped so unzip it with unzip. I think that ndiswrapper then wants ndiswrapper -i <path to windows driver .INF file>. If this all works, at this point you should probably reboot. Once the system is up, enter the command "dmesg | less". If you search for "ndis" (/ followed by ndis and then hit enter) you should see something like:

ndiswrapper version 1.1 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
ndiswrapper: driver netbc564 (,10/01/2002,3.70.17.5) loaded
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:02.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
ndiswrapper: using irq 169
Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
eth0: link down
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:90:4b:ac:8f:67 using driver netbc564, configuration file 14E4:4320:103C:12F8.5.conf
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP, WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP

The instructions on the ndiswrapper download page are way better than what I vaguely remember from getting my wireless card working so follow what they have t say if there is any conflict between their instructions and mine. It really is fairly simple if you have the right windoze driver version.