Hi there!,

I just installed my Debian (sarge) (kernel 2.4.25) on Laptop which has a Realtek 8180l (rtl8180l) wireless mini-pci nic.

I am actually trying to use ndiswrapper to get it working.
(I have installed ndiswrapper, 0.9 using aptitude. I used the 170 windows driver on Realtek's website.
But 'ndiswrapper -l' gave me : net8180 hardware NOT present)

But found out that 'iwconfig' was not installed. So went and installed it.
But when run: 'iwconfig' - I get :
:~# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

I don't quite know how to set things up from here on.

Would be very grateful if one of you could point me in the right direction here.

Thanks a lot
ps1. ifconfig works on the system. ie I am using eth0 lan nic now.
ps2 my /etc/network/interfaces is :
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# This entry denotes the loopback (127.0.0.1) interface.
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# This entry was created during the Debian installation
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# This entry by me for wlan
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

That is the source of your problem. That message is telling you that ndiswrapper is not able to work with that windows driver. You're going to need to do some hunting to find a driver that works with ndiswrapper. If you have any CDs that came with your laptop, check there for older drivers (newer windows drivers are not always the best approach with ndiswrapper). Otherwise start your hunt at the ndiswrapper site.

Thanks for your reply Hangdog,

I have tried the driver on my CD as well but still comes with the same error.
(hardware NOT found)

Do I have to make a configuration file for modprobe? (how?)

Also just wondering why the output at least from iwconfig doesn't give values for 'lo' at least.

I'll keep looking for older driver inf files for the moment

Ok since then I have done 'ndiswrapper -m'
(Adding "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" to /etc/modutils/ndiswrapper)

and then a 'modprobe ndiswrapper'
(modprobe: Can't locate module ndiswrapper)

but haven't been successful.

If modprobe can't locate the module, then something very basic went wrong. Were there any error messages when you did make install? And were you root when you ran make install? Actually I just saw that you used aptitude to install ndiswrapper. I'm completely unfamiliar with that so I'm guessing that is where the problem is. Try compiling ndiswrapper from source. The INSTALL file is really easy to follow and you may either get a better result or a better idea of what is going wrong. By the way, you are going to need your kernel source installed if you compile ndiswrapper from source.

Since lo isn't a wireless device, the output you see if perfectly normal.

Ok I will be installing a new version of ndiswrapper, taking your advice..

sorry for being such a newbie at this... but are you meaning I have to download the kernel file and compile the kernel as well ??

Also in the INSTALL file it says:
How do we make this link?

Thanks for any help on this
Cheers

You shouldn't have to compile a new kernel and I'm assuming that Debian has a package of the kernel source code for any of their stock kernels. Every other distro does, so I imagine Debian does as well. You just have to find the kernel sources that match the kernel you are currently running and install them. If you installed Debian from CD, I would imagine that the kernel source would be on one of those. Otherwise I would look at the Debian site.

At this point I wouldn't worry about the link. My experience is that the kernel source code packages set up links properly. The only one I've had to set is a link named linux that points to the kernel source directory.

ls -s /usr/src/linux-versionnumber /usr/src/linux

By the way, I've been seeing people have serious problems with the module built by ndiswrapper 0.9. If you get kernel panics when you modprobe, forget about 0.9 and drop back to 0.7.

You have to install the kernel module also. I haven't done this succesfully yet, but I'm working on it (see the link). If I can't get the 2.6.7-1-686 source, I'm going to try to use the 2.6.7 source and change the options on the module when install the ndiswrapper module. Due to the debian quirks, this seems to be an operation that requires more doing than on other distributions where "make" does everything. Once I have it working, I'll create a HOWTO.

Brian