Hello forum,
I have recently installed a copy of Mandriva 2007 Free as a dual boot option on my pc after messing around with some vm's of the product and trying to get to grips with linux. Unfortunatley I am unable to use this installation as I cannot get my on-board sound card or my USB wireless network interface to work. This post is regarding my USB wireless network card details below:

Netgear WG111v2 (USB)

I have read on a few sites regarding the use of NDISWrapper to be able to use the windows drivers which came with the card. I have found examples of how to install NDISWrapper (which seem rather lengthy and involve rebuilding the kernel).

I went into MCC and into the network settings and decided to add a new wireless interface. I chose the option to use NDISWrapper(must be installed with Mandriva 2007, but I can't confirm this anywhere) and located my windows driver under the WINXP folder of the netgear cd. However this fails and says to install files from ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net.

Has anyone got this USB wireless network interface to work using Mandriva 2007?

Apologies for lack of specific machine information (I am at work) I will update later, although this is the 64-bit mandriva 2007 as I am using AMD/64 chip.

Any help/direction appreciated.

You can install ndiswrapper or check if it is installed through your package manager. Did you install the sources for the packages from http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ ? If not do that. This way you will also be able to update packages and install plf stuff.

So after sources are installed. Goto package manager (mcc) and search for ndiswrapper (if it has a green check in front of it, it is installed) so thats good. otherwise install it.

Now you need the 64-bit driver (this is important!) for your USB device since you are running 64bit. Check the readme of ndiswrapper to install, i think you'll have to modprobe ndiswrapper to load it in the kernel then with the userland tool "ndiswrapper" install the 64bit driver. (ndiswrapper -i /lib64/windows/mydriver.inf)

If this does not work, post the output in /var/log/messages. Its always good to keep this log at close view, you can keep this open with "tail -f /var/log/messages) also dmesg will show you the latest kernel messages.

If that does not work, you can dowload the latest ndiswrapper release and extract it to /usr/src and compile and install it, but first try that