Howdy!

Here's my situation: My father gave me his ancient toshiba satellite laptop with windows 98 on it for christmas. I formatted and installed Damn small linux (not), or (not) damn small linux (or however they call that thing) - if you don't know, its basically DSL except with a lot of fairly essential (and some not so essential) things that were left out of the plain DSL distro.

I want to use this laptop to access the internet through the wireless network at school on campus. I have a linksys wpc54g v 3.1 wireless card that I just bought from best buy. According to the DSL wiki this card should be compatible so long as I use ndiswrapper to load the windows drivers. This doesn't seem to be the case however.

I first tried simply clicking on the "ndiswrapper" program in the net setup menu in DSL(N), which brought up a window with 4 fields - the path to the windows driver, the wireless device (by default wlan0), and a wid and wep key. When I fill these in and hit enter, the computer just hangs for a second then brings up a window that says that ndiswrapper failed to connect to the network. I know for certain I entered everything correctly except for the device - I left this at wlan0. Is there a possibility that my wireless card would exist under a name other than this?

Next I tried using ndiswrapper the old fashioned way - through the console. The windows 98/ME driver, which I obtained from the CD that came with the card, was the only one that, after installing, would NOT show "invalid driver" when I typed "ndiswrapper -l." The XP and VISTA drivers always came up as "invalid drivers."

However, all THREE of the drivers show the message "netcard invalid driver" at the end, even though just before outputting this ndiswrapper -l says "driver installed, hardware present." I don'tk now if I'm explaining this clearly so I'll show you the exact message:


lsbcmnds driver installed, hardware present
netcard invalid driver!


I tried going on to the modprobe step, which did not throw any errors but when I checked the log with dmesg I get something saying:

Windows driver is not 32-bit: bad magic: 020B

Huh?! This is a driver for Windows 98! How could it possibly NOT be 32-bit?

Can anyone help me figure out what the heck is going on and how I might fix it?

Given the option I would have (and did) purchase the Asus WL107g which uses a free Ralink driver in Linux with no ndiswrapper needed. Took me about 5 minutes to get setup and working in Linux when i didn't know jack about wireless. A lot less to fight with.


Here is a troubleshooting guide for ndiswrapper that may help..

Best buy carry a wireless card that ships with linux drivers? I think microsoft would have some people assassinated if they tried to do any such thing.

Of course I could look elsewhere. Unfortunately I already purchased this wireless card and would like to try at least a little more to get it to function before I try to return it.

Oh, and I think you forgot to post the troubleshooting guide. I appreciate the help nonetheless.

Ugh I sure did miss that link.. let me see if I can find it again Made that post kind of worthless.
finally reach guru status and I still can't operate a simple web browser.. how embarrasing

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=885847

Hope that helps..



BestBuy.. heh. You should have heard the dispariging remarks the sales guy made about the Asus EeePC and Linux. If I were an Asus representative, I think we would have a case..... Meanwhile Microcenter, a local PC store, Stocks about 10-12 different netbooks with Linux and Windows and they are just flying off the shelves..

use slitaz