Belkin Wireless Card: Not Found
 

I recently purchased a Belkin F5D7010 wireless card. I installed ndiswrapper successfully, I think. I installed the drivers from the Windows setup disk, but the power light on the card isn't on, and it doesn't seem detected anywhere except under "ndiswrapper -l", where it says the hardware and the drivers are present. How can a get it to work?
I am running Slackware 10.2 with the 2.4 kernel.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Welcome to LQ!

Getting the driver installed is only part of the battle. The next step would be to configure your card using iwconfig and then either requesting an IP address with dhcpcd or assigning one with ifconfig and route. If you can give us an idea of what you've done to configure the card and get an IP address, we can probably point you in a decent direction. It would also help if you posted the outputs of ifconfig and iwconfig.

Thanks for your reply. Here are the results:
# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:39:C8:D0:DF
inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:180 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:181 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:123407 (120.5 Kb) TX bytes:39652 (38.7 Kb)
Interrupt:11

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

No luck. But, by such a strange coincedence, my wireless card happens to use a Broadcom chipset. These drivers in your sig look promising...

Given that iwconfig isn't finding anything, I'm guessing that the ndiswrapper module isn't loaded. If you run lsmod in a console, do you see ndiswrapper?

The Broadcom drivers in my sig do work, but they are under heavy development and can be a bit flaky. I tend to use ndsiwrapper when I absolutely need a stable connection.

Thanks for reminding me of that stupid error; the module wasn't loaded. Now, I have loaded it, but still the card isn't seen in ifconfig.

Not seeing it in ifconfig is OK. Not seeing it in iwconfig is not. I'm going to assume that loading the module does cause wlan0 to show up in iwconfig. If that is so, then you need to request an IP address from a DHCP server or assign a static IP address.

For DHCP run (as root):

dhcpcd wlan0

That should get you up and running (although if it still doesn't show up in ifconfig, try running ifconfg wlan0 up after the dhcpcd command).

If you want a static IP it takes three steps:

ifconfig wlan0 xxx.xxxx.xxx.xxx (use the IP address you want your laptop to have)

route add default gw yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy (where yyy is the IP address of your router).

Finally, edit your /etc/resolv.conf file and add a line for each nameserver that your ISP has:

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

I'm sorry. Both ifconfig and iwconfig don't see wlan0.

Make sure that your /etc/modprobe.conf file contains the alias ndsiwrapper wlan0 line (it should have beeen put there by running ndiswrapper -m). If it isn't there, add it and then reload the ndiswrapper module.

If that doesn't cause wlan0 to appear, you'll need to dig through your logs (/var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages) and see if ndiswrapper is complaining about anything.

Thanks again for the reply; I really appreciate your help.

I found the alias line in /etc/modules.conf. I reloaded the module, but the card still isn't seen.

After (literally) grepping through the logs, I found this in syslog:

ndiswrapper (pnp_start_device:494): Windows driver couldn't initialize the device (C0000001)

this was in dmesg:
ndiswrapper: request for irq 0 failed
ndiswrapper (miniport_init:228): couldn't initialize device: C000009A
ndiswrapper (pnp_start_device:494): Windows driver couldn't initialize the device (C0000001)

Any suggestions?

There are a couple of things that come to mind here. Sometimes in the line before your dmesg errors, you see an ACPI line. If that is there, I would try booting with acpi turned off (try passing acpi=off at boot) and see if that helps. It also might be a mismatch between teh Windows driver and ndiswrapper. Unfortunately, sometimes getting ndiswrapper to work comes down to trial and error between the ndiswrapper version and the particular Windows driver. In your first post you said you used the drivers from the Windows install CD for this card. Instead of using that, dig into the ndiswrapper wiki (see my sig for the link) and see what driver they suggest to use. If that doesn't work, I would try the latest driver from the Belkin website.

One other potentially confounding factor is the 2.4.x kernel you're running. Ndiswrapper can work with 2.4 kernels, but they do suggest moving to a 2.6.x kernel. If the turning off acpi and trying other Windows drivers doesn't work, you might try upgrading your kernel.

SUCCESS! I am writing this in Linux, connected wirelessly. ACPI was the problem. Thank you so much for helping me through this!