Nevermind my earlier post. It turns out, after digging around like a newbie hacker that D-Link lied (well misinformed) me about the chipset in my DWL-650. It is not the ADMtek 8211, but rather the Realtek RTL8180. Two days wasted because I didn't know how to check on my own. Well, lesson learned.

Here is my current situation. I've loaded ndiswrapper 1.1. I loaded the D-Link driver successfully and got activity. But was not able to change any configuration on the card, ESSID, Mode to Managed etc.

At this point I wanted to check on another PCMCIA card I have lying around, the Asante AL1611. This also uses the Realtek chipset. Every site I've been to lists this card as incompatible with Linux which, ironically (as you will see), is the reason for getting the DWL-650. But hey, I've installed and reinstalled my OS so many times in 48 hours I figured, why not. So I removed the D-Link driver directory from /etc/ndiswrapper and then installed the AL1611 .inf.

I've gone through all the configurations and everything seems fine.
I've got the correct ESSID, I've set the IP to a static one that I know works on my network.
I can ping my wireless router. I can also ping the Linux box from my iBook.
(EDIT: ALSO I CAN PING EXTERNAL IP ADRESSES
EDIT 2: CORRECTION I CAN PING EXTERNAL IPS, BUT NOT WHEN I USE NAMES, e.g. i tried to ping ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net and got an unkown host response. Is this dns?)
But I can't get any network traffic from outside the wireless router. No web pages come through etc.


Why is this?

any ideas would be greatly appreciated?

Is this simply a DNS problem?

if i can get this to work I will definitely add this card to the ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/List

System specs:
Sony Vaio PCG-XG18
Mandrake 10.1
Linux Kernel 2.6.8
ndiswrapper 1.1
Asante FriendlyNet AL1611

It does sound like a DNS problem. Usually the best way to handle this is to add the IP addresses of your ISP's nameservers to your /etc/resolv.conf file. For each nameserver, add the line nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to the file (just replace the xxx with the proper IP address).

thanks, that did the trick.
I'm sending this reply wirelessly.
I had gone back to the d-link card.
Next is to reinstall the al1611, see if that works, and post to all the lists that in fact it does.
I could have saved a lot of time if I had known that from the beginning, but no list stated it did, in fact many said it didn't. So I bought the dwl-650, and on and on, I'm sure your familiar with this story...
anyway, I just put
namserver 192.168.0.1 in the reslolv.conf and it works against the dns numbers already in my router.
Thanks again, so happy that problem is done.
Now it's time to set up my printer.........
mepasha