Wireless woes with Mandrake 10.1
 

OK, I'm at my wits end with Linux and am about to reinstall XP on my box. Mandrake 10.1 is about the 6th or 7th distro I've tried now and I'm still having troubles.

I installed Mandrake 10.1 and successfully configured the screen resolution to 1280x800 on my Gateway laptop after much trying. However, I just *CAN'T* seem to get the internal wireless network card to be recognized properly by Mandrake. If I go System>>Configuration>>Hardware>>Hardrake it seems to recognize my woreless card OK with the following details:

Identification
Vendor: Broadcom Corp.
Description: BCM94306 802.11g NIC
Media Class: NETWORK_OTHER

Connection
Bus: PCI
Bus PCI#: 1
PCI Device #: 9
PCI function #: 0
Vendor ID: 5348
Device ID: 17184
Sub Vendor ID: 6137
Sub device ID: 2

Misc
Module: unknown

Now if I go to Mandrakelinux Control Center and choose "Network & Internet>>Manage Connections", it doesn't give me the option of choosing my wireless device in the menu.

If, still in Control Center, I go to "Create New Connection" and choose "Wireless connection" and click Next... it asks me to manually load a driver. My driver is not showing up in the list.

Then I tried ndiswrapper (I did this once before successfully in Linspire) with my driver "BCMWL5A.INF" and ndiswrapper indicates that the driver is indeed present. Yet, if I do modprobe ndiswrapper I get the following error message:

"FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found"

I installed ndiswrapper with "ndiswrapper-0.9-1mdk.i586.rpm" - perhaps I'm using the wrong one? Perhaps I don't need ndiswrapper at all if Mandrake already seems to recognize my hardware? I have no clue what to do anymore so any help at all would be appreciated.

Re: Wireless woes with Mandrake 10.1
 

ok try the NDISWRAPPER-1.1.tar.gz

then do unzipp and uncomress the archive
then do
make
then
make install
then go into the directory where you have your BCMWLA5a.inf file at and type

ndiswrapper -i *.inf

then try modprobe ndiswrapper
if still fails you might need to upgrade your kernel for when I upgraded my kernel modprobe started working for me instead of locking up.

OK, thanks I'll try that. :-)