Ndiswrapper Help with D-link DWL-G510
 

Hi all,

I am new to linux (about a week) and am running Mandrake 10.0.

My problem is concerning ndiswrapper 0.8, and I'm using a D-Link DWL-G510.
I've tried several win32 drivers: the ones from the cdrom, the asus Marvel ones recommended by the Ndiswrapper homepage, and even some that show as present in ndiswrapper which i don't know where I got them.

Here's the problem: I have gotten the cdrom drivers to work; however, ndiswrapper registered the card as eth1, as opposed to wlan0, and mcc did not display driver name, module, etc. I could find my AP (im using a microsoft wireless router; anyone know if ms has a stupid filter for linux? I wouldn't put it past them...) using iwlist eth1 scan. I had both Linuxant driverloader and Ndiswrapper installed at the same time, but i was receiving error messages from driverloader about tainting the kernel, so i uninstalled it (it wouldn't install the drivers in its pretty GUI fake-website thing). Promptly, the card was lost in iwconfig. Reinstalled driverloader, did the whole thing again; still nothing.) So i reinstalled Mandrake, installed every package mentioned, issued every command mentioned in wikis, guide, anywhere...and still nothing.

(I remember issuing a command in the Konsole which was similar to, or was "CONFIG_NET_RADIO", which suddenly caused iwconfig to show wireless card. But, of course, that does nothing now.)

Help would be very much appreciated...I apologize for the length of this post, and I know there are many other posts regarding this card: none of them worked.


Thanks again.

EDIT: The drivers I thought were for DWL-g510 on the Ndiswrapper website (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net) are for DWL-510, not g510. anyone know if they are the same card? i suspect not, because the chipset is different...

A few things to think about:

Mandrake 10 has ndiswrapper 0.4 installed, and unless you remove it before installing a later version, it can cause trouble. Basically you just need to remove the kernel module from /lib/modules/kernelversion/misc.

That's not a problem as long as eth1 is recognized as a wirless card. Check your /etc/modprobe.conf file and make sure that the line alias wlan0 ndiswrapper is there. That should make wlan0 work.

OK, having both linuxant and ndiswrapper modules installed at the same time is almost certainly going to cause a problem. The tainting message is nothing to worry about . All that means is that a module was loaded that wasn't released under the GPL and therefore your kernel has been "tainted" by the presence of proprietary code. My opinion is that the tainting message is phenomenally stupid and needlessly scary.

Um, CONFIG_NET_RADIO isn't a console command, but rather a configuration parameter for when you are compiling your own kernel. It does have to be set in order for wireless to work, but if you are using a stock Mandrake kernel, it almost certainly was.

So, if you are still stuck, run lspci to find out what chipset your card uses and get a driver for that chipset from the ndiswrapper site. Then go remove all ndiswrapper and linuxant kernel modules. Finally, pick either linuxant or ndiswrapper and re-install just that. From there you should be able to configure your card with iwconfig.

thank you for the help...when I installed linuxant and ndiswrapper at the same time I knew almost nothing about linux; I figured that was bad, and i reinstalled...Also, ndiswrapper 0.4 does come with linux in rpmdrake, but it isn't installed. I've heard there are problems with 0.8, so I'll try the earlier version. It says to enable CONFIG_NET_RADIO and CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS in the ndiswrapper wiki (i assume by using =on), but it was probably for a different distro.

I'll try your recommendations soon....thanks again.

Downloaded ndiswrapper0.9, showing wlan0 and iwconfig works! Thank you, turns out 0.8 wasn't writing the alias to modprobe.conf.

(sorry about three posts in a row)
The network is up and running. thanks!

After scouting around, installing ndiswrapper, finding the DWL-510 driver and apparently etting that set up, I still can't make it work for my Wireless G card -- I'm assuming I'm messing up configuring the INF (such as the "Supported Cards" page suggests on the Ndis website suggests).

Any recommendations?

Could I ask what constitutes doesn't work? Also, are you sure that you have the Realtek chipset?

Going to the ndiswrapper site, as was suggested above, the chipset mentioned for the DWL-510 is the Realtek 8180. asdfjkl; got his DWL-G510 to work, so I figured that wouldn't be too big an issue. I edited the .inf file (admittedly clumsily; there weren't any straight "ec10:8180" references) and enabled them through ndiswrapper. Using "ndiswrapper -l" however, reports that the device is _not_ present.

Using lscpi I found that the pciid for my card was "11ab:1a6", which I tried changing all the references to. Still no avail.

Well, the device not present error usually suggests that the windows driver and ndiswrapper aren't connecting....Which brings me back to one of my orignial questions. The admittedly limited amount of googling I've done on this card suggests that there may be more than one chipset used in this card and they weren't all Realtek. Which is why I suggested taking a look at the output of lspci and verifying that your card does indeed have a Realtek chipset.

That said, if you have any CDs or older drivers that came with this card, it might be worth a shot trying those. Sometimes with ndiswrapper it is a case of finding the right combination of ndiswrapper and windows driver.

Thanks -- I figured I just needed to find a new inf driver, but confirmation is always nice :) Googling didn't reveal too much (aside from the two different types of chipsets you mentioned), but I'm sure if I keep poking around I'll find something.

Thanks for your input!

Update: I'm wondering, asdjkl; how you got the "g" card to work -- I can't find .inf drivers for it anywhere, and the D-Link website doesn't even list unofficial drivers for that model card (yet). Anyone else have success with ndiswrapper and the DWL-G510 card?

DWL-G510 Drivers
 

A few things.

First, from what I have been able to find, D-Link has only released one version of Windows drivers for this card. That is version 1.00.
These drivers are available here:

http://www.dlink.com/products/suppor...id=308#drivers

Finally, from what I can tell, this card uses a Marvell chipset, not a Realtek. The drivers are written by Marvell, and ndiswrapper webpages says that this card has a Marvell chipset.


Good luck.

Luke

Yep, its a Marvell... hence the driver name: MRV8k51. Anyhoo, I used the driver from the cd...BUT...I didn't use the WinXP drivers. I had to use the Windows ME drivers, which actually worked. And, anything below ndiswrapper 0.9 didn't load the driver.

I think that, if you've lost your cd, you should use the ME drivers from D-Link.

the xp drivers do work but you have to set a static client in the router's ip table then set the card's ip to whatever was set in the static client table

then modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig (usuall options for your syste)
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.106 gateway 192.168.0.1
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhcpcd

should work but this was on slackware 10
this is assuming you have ndiswrapper installed and have used the d-link drivers

Not to beat a dead horse, but I've finally gotten ahold of my old CD (and the mrv8k51.inf driver), but ndiswrapper doesn't seem to like it.

After poking around inside the inf file, I find that the W8100PCI is referenced inside the "Win XP DDInstall section" of the file, including AddReg and CopyFiles sections. After running ndiswrapper as above, the mrv8k51 directory is still created, within which are several .conf files and the executable mrv8k51.inf

Trying ndiswrapper -l gives me "Installed ndis drivers: mrv8k51 hardware present" and my ailiased (via ndiswrapper -m) wlan0 isn't recognized.

Thoughts?