I finally got my wireless D-Link650+ card to work after many hours of heartache and debugging. I thought I would share experiences with you all so hopefully you wont have to go through the same thing

first, following the instructions on:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...p?product=1125

this page is specifically for dlink650+ but the principles should be the same for any wireless card you intend to use via ndiswrapper

The other thing you may need to install is "wireless tools". This is included with the CDs of my dist Mandrake 10 though I had to manually intall it. This gives you access to commands like iwconfig, iwlist, iwactivity...

Follow the steps in above link to configure ndiswrapper and your card.

Assuming you have ndiswrapper installed and configured for you card, you should get a device like wlan0 when you run "ifconfig -a"

There are two cases and I realised that not both worked, ie. no matter what you do, if you get case 1 when you plug your card in it's not going to work (well, it's fairer to say I could not get it to work):

FIRST (CASE 1)
==============
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:80:C8:2C:7F:08
inet6 addr: fe80::280:c8ff:fe2c:7f08/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:308 (308.0 b)
Interrupt:11 Memory:20820000-20821ff

SECOND (CASE 2)
===============
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:80:C8:2C:7F:08
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 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:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:11 Memory:20820000-20821fff

The main difference between case 1 and case 2 is that case 1 picks the device as inet6 and link is up.

In case 1, I found any iwconfig commands were being accpeted but then deleted straight away (realised this using a while loop to run iwlist wlan0 key every one second)

In Case 2 though, the iwconfig commands were being accepted, hence enabling me to set the ESSID and keys so that I could connect successfully

However, this is all very well and it helps me connect successfully but could anyone explain why Case 1 and Case 2 are different?

Thanks

CK