recently i revived a very old toshiba 220cds with 16mb ram. DSL runs fine on this thing, but i NEED internet access (theres no ethernet port). my only option is to use my d-link dwa-130 wireless n usb adapter. i have the driver i need, it's a .inf file for win xp and i've been trying to use ndiswrapper-- but thats not the problem. i know this adapter works fine in linux, i use it with ndiswrapper on my HP laptop and it works like a dream. after i run ndiswrapper -i for install, ndiswrapper -m (alias already exists), and then modprobe ndiswrapper all appears good. ndiswrapper -l says device install hardware present or whatever it says. i go to run iwconfig, theres nothing except for the loopback 'lo' displayed. i get 'no wireless extensions.' i know the usb port works on this thing, thats how i installed DSL in the firt place (no cd-rom). so, my question is, if ndiswrapper and everything works fine, where is my wlan0 ? i've tried downloading the latest version of ndiswrapper only to find out that i didn't have 'make' or a compiler on DSL... i got the clacker MyDSL package and tried 'make distclean' in the new ndiswrapper extracted folder, i get the error that KBUILD is not in the kernel tree (something like that)... i'm no expert with this kind of stuff but seriously, it's been driving me nuts.. the kernel i'm using is 2.4.31, i tried the 2.6x kernel with DSL-N but that for some reason was dreafully slow and took the laptop atleast 10 mins to boot. any help would be greatly appreciated.......

The wireless LAN is not necessarily named 'wlan*'. Try:

ifconfig -a

If ndiswrapper makes good use of the /sys virtual filesystem you may even find the interface name there:

ls -l /sys/class/net

I just hope you didn't get anything else screwed up while attempting to get things to work.

Are you sure that is all of the driver? Frequently Windows drivers are in two files, a .inf file and a .sys file. Since the .sys file is the actual driver, this might be the problem.

This might also be the root of the problem. The 2.4 series of kernels really don't support wireless well, if at all. You really should check and see if DSL has a pared down 2.6 kernel, or roll one of your own.

You also should check your log files and see if ndiswrapper is complaining about anything.

hey thanks for the reply, it is an .inf and .sys file actually, but i have both, used it the same way i did on my ubuntu box with the same peice of hardware. i'll give those commands a try and see what i can come up with.. not too worried about f'ing things up because it's a fresh install and i can just do another hd install which doesn't take very long at all. thanks a lot for the suggestions. a gut feeling tells me it might be the 2.4 kernel though. i wouldn't have the slightest clue on upgrading to 2.6

arrgh i must have missed it before, but i checked dmesg and saw that ndiswrapper was spitting out errors after all, and a bug in usb-ohci.c which says a bug in call to c1842201 or something and "use async!" tried searching for the error on google and it just brought me to pages with source code.... blaaaah. perhaps it could be the fact that i have so little ram and the driver cant load or something.

OK, here is a suggestion. DSL-N, which apparently has more up-to-date stuff, including a 2.6.x kernel. They don't stick to the 50MB limit DSL does, but with a newer kernel, I'm betting wireless stands a chance of working. I just have my doubts about getting it to go on a 2.4 kernel.