Hello --

My situation is one of those which may or may not make you want to smack your foreheads against your keyboards. I'm a newbie to Linux -- basically, I expressed interest in it, my friend lent me the discs, we got it installed, and he left me to wade alone through a veritable ocean of seemingly mindboggling commands.

After a month or so, I was able to do basic tasks, online and off, via terminal and an external (yes, dial-up) modem.

However, now that I've moved cross-country, I want to hook my FC2 box up to a wireless network pre-existing in the townhome in which I reside. (The service is provided by Verizon, if that helps at all. Probably not, but I thought I'd include any bits of info I had.)

I'm trying to use a Netgear WG311v2 card, and since that particular piece of hardware wasn't listed when I tried to set up a new wireless device (it didn't look like it had anything from Netgear at all), I have a sickening feeling that I might have to download a driver, etcetera.

I browsed the INTARWEBZ for something, anything, that might help me. I stumbled across NdisWrapper, and I thought that my problems had been solved. I understood everything in the installation until it came to "you must download a Windows driver." Bzuh? (You may all commence the keyboard-to-forehead jig. I promise you, I'm not usually this ignorant.) Nothing past that made any sense.

That leaves me in my current predicament. I'm just about to burn ndiswrapper-1.2.tar.gz onto a CD. Does ANYONE out there have instructions/advice on how to get this thing to work with my card/distro -- instructions that I can understand? I apologise in advance if the solution is glaringly obvious, but I'm just not getting it.

ndiswrapper is fairly straightforward to configure. Basically, extract the tar.gz archive onto your machine. Navigate to the directory that has been created for it, and as root, do

This will compile the driver. You'll need your configured kernel sources for this to work. Once that's done, get hold of the windows driver for the WG311 and copy it to the machine. Specifically, you'll need the .inf file. Once you have that, do

Replace <filename.inf> with the filename of the inf file. If all is well and good, if you then do

it should then list your driver as installed. If it's picked up the hardware for it it will say something like driver installed, hardware present.



Having said all this, I had problems with the stability of ndiswrapper. I've got a netgear MA111 which is similar to the WG311 I believe (it's based on the same chipset) and although I did get it to work with ndiswrapper, it wasn't particularly stable. I have since tried with the linux-wlan drivers instead and they are much more stable as they are native linux and so don't do all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. You might want to have a go with both to see which works better for you

Thanks very much! I'll try your suggestions and post any updates to this thread.