LinuxQuestions.org - Debian (amd64) on a notebook (Gateway MX6425)

I just bought a new notebook 4 days ago, the Gateway MX6425. The specs can be seen here: http://www.gateway.com/home/products...t_mx6425.shtml

I the first night I played around on it's windows (came with machine) and downloaded some software to repartition the drive. I made windows 25gb and took out the recovery partition completely. I set 1gb of space at the beginning of the drive for swap and moved the windows partition right after it. The end of the drive (70 or so gb) I have reserved for Debian.

Ok, so the second night I download the Debian amd64 Netinst CD and start to install it, only to realize my ethernet is not being seen (wireless i pretty much knew it wouldn't work, but the lan line is not recognized at all). The setup asks me if I want to load drivers from a floppy, and I can't say yes, even if i had a floppy disk with drivers because i dont have a floppy drive on this machine. So I said no and continued on with a minimal base install. Overnight I downloaded both DVDs of Debian amd64 (on my desktop).

The third night I add the DVDs to apt sources with apt-cdrom and then I start installing all my ussual things and told myself I'll set all the hardware crap up later.

A few hours later I have problems with the display, which I wont get into here, but it made me start looking at all the things I cant get to work. I start diging around the net for solutions and I cant find much dealing with this exact computer with linux.

I did however, find one site where someone had installed Fedora Core 4 onto this machine and had some problems and solved some of them. (http://roguestar.dynu.com:5555/gateway.html) He said he got his wireless ehternet working just by using the windows drivers with ndiswrapper.

This is where my problem begins. ndiswrapper is not on the DVDs I downloaded, so I am guessing its not in the main distro (must be either contrib or non-free). So I go to the debian.org site to download it only to find out their packaging search thing is down.... So I go to google and try to find another place to download the .deb (i hate manual compiles). No luck, but I did find the source from sourceforge.

So I go to compile it and it yells at me that I dont have my kernel source code installed... So I used apt-get to install it, and then I tried again. Same error came. After playing for an hour or two I realized that apt-get just placed a .bz2 file containing the kernel source on my drive, so I extracted it. It automatically put the files in /usr/src/kernel-source-(cant remember rest)/. So I go back and start to compile ndiswrapper, same damn error. It cant find the kernel source files.

So, I am giving up my trying to compile this damn thing manually. I am here to ask where can I find a .deb for this?

I am running Debian 3.1r0a (Sarge) on the amd64 architecture. I am not sure which version of ndiswrapper I am going to need, just as long as It will install with dpkg and it will accept my windows drivers for my wireless ethernet.

Thanks for any help, and sorry this post got so long for such a little question.. I guess I just had to vent a little to keep my sanity.

EDIT: Over the next few weeks I think I am going to be asking a lot of different questions here dealing with a lot of different hardware problems I am having (mouse, display [ATI drivers], sound, lan line [ethernet], card readers, usb ports, etc etc).