Hi -

I recently installed Debian Etch on my machine and am trying to get wireless set up with my Linksys WPC54G card. I have been successful in the past getting wireless to work under Sarge with a 2.6.8 kernel, but now I am using a 2.6.12 kernel and everything goes fine until I try to load the ndiswrapper module, when I get this message:

FATAL: module ndiswrapper not found.

I know that ndiswrapper is installed; after all, at this point I have installed the driver and all that using ndiswrapper. I am not using a customized kernel or anything fancy like that; I just want my wireless to work. Any suggestions as to what I should do? Please keep in mind that I am "halfway good" with Linux - I can throw out a lot of the terminology, but I know just enough to cause major problems by thinking I know more. Thanks!

-Ron

Have you re-compiled ndiswrapper since installing your new kernel, making sure the updated kernel sources are also available for it...?

No, I haven't done anything with recompliling ndiswrapper. I didn't think I needed to, as I was using Debian Sarge and am now using Debian Etch. Under Sarge, I simply used the default ndiswrapper package available in accordance with the default kernel available. I figured the exercise would be the same in etch, to use the default ndiswrapper package in conjunction with the default kernel.

I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) you'll need to recompile ndiswrapper with your newer kernel sources, otherwise you're running kernel doesn't recognise the ndiswrapper module since it will only be available under your old kernel tree. It doesn't long to recompile ndiswrapper, so give it a go.

Okay, I'm having some struggles understanding what I need to do for this. Let me tell you what I have done:

1. Downloaded kernel source code linux-2.6.12.tar.gz from kernel.org
2. Downloaded ndiswrapper 1.2 source

The installation wiki on the ndiswrapper page tells me that I need to link the kernel source to the modules directory, and I can do that with this command:

ln -s /usr/src/linux-<kernel-version> /lib/modules/VERSION/build

This is probably where I am running into my problems. It looks to me like I need to move my kernel source to /usr/src/linux-2.6.12, so I did this by
tar -xzf linux-2.6.12.tar.gz
mv linux-2.6.12 /usr/src

Now /usr/src/linux-2.6.12 exists so I can link to it.

Right after this instruction on the installation wiki it says to make sure you have started compiling the kernel sources so that the necessary header files are present. How exactly do I do that? I don't know if that is the problem or not.

Anyway, I continue following the instructions and am told to go to source-directory. Is this the ndiswrapper source or the kernel source? I try going to ndiswrapper directory and type make as the instructions say and am told

Can't find kernel sources in /lib/modules/2.6.12-1-386/build;

Where am I going wrong?

You compile kernel with command:
Now reboot with new kernel and than try to compile ndiswrapper. Otherwise it will compile module to an old kernel.