LinuxQuestions.org - Belkin F5D7010 PCMCIA Problems

PLEASE NOTE: This is a server install of Ubuntu 6.06. It boots to CLI and not GUI. Fluxbox is my primary, no Gnome or KDE.

Greetings Folks,

I have been doing some reading regarding ndiswrapper with WPA enabled access points. One of the things I am having a problem with is that the card seems to be recognized, but not functioning.

I downloaded ndiswrapper and followed the instructions on the site for installation.
My PCMCIA wi-fi card is a F5D7010 ver2 (according to the back of the card). According to the ndiswrapper website, the card should work fine with the .INF file from my installation CD. Well I cannot for the life of me find my installation CD, so I did the normal prayer-to-Google and it worked. I found a few on Driverguide.com.

I unpacked the .EXE and grabbed the .cat, .sys and .inf files. I copied them to the machine and did my:

Code:

ndiswrapper -i bwmwl5.ini

I then checked:

Code:

ndiswrapper -l

and I get this:

Code:

Installed drivers:

bcmwl5    driver installed, hardware present

I then did the:

Code:

ndiswrapper -m

Right now, I have no radio light, and normally under Windows I would once the card is inserted in the machine and recognized.

Anywho, I then rebooted to make sure things were cool and tried to fire up wpa_supplicant for the wi-fi.

It was said that when using ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant, I need to do:

Code:

wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Apparently it wants you do use -Dwext instead of -Dndiswrapper... but I tried both.

When I give it that command, I get this back:

Code:

ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]:  No such device

ioctl[SIOCSIWMODE]:  No such device

Could not configure driver to use managed mode

Could not set interface 'wlan0' UP

<more ioctl errors...>

Well I saw the wlan0 UP error and upon doing an ifconfig I noticed that there is NO wlan0, it seems my wi-fi card is eth1 according to iwconfig.

I then tried the same wpa_supplicant command, but changed -iwlan0 to -ieth1 and I get this:

Code:

[42950320.580000] bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.

SIOCSIFFLAGS:  No such file or directory

Could not set interface 'eth1' UP

l2_packet_receive - recvfrom: Network is down

ioctl[SIOCSIWSCAN]: No such device

Failed to initiate AP scan.

And it stops there so I need to CTRL-C it.

So I am kinda curious if anyone has had success with the ver2 of this card, and if so, PLEASE share how you did it as it seems each version of the card has a different way of getting it to work under Ubuntu...

HELP. :)