Linksys Drivers for Linux

LinuxGuru707 · 08-03-2006, 10:57 PM

Hi Everyone,
just wanted to know where or how I can get my WPC54GX linksys card to work with suse 10.1. Linksys does not support this card for linux. It would be great if I can get this to work, any thoughts or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Anthony

zetabill · 08-03-2006, 11:08 PM

If it has a Broadcom 4308 chipset you can use the bcm43xx driver that fits well with the new kernels. If it has a Broadcom 4318 chipset... mine works quite well with ndiswrapper. Either way, there are some decent instructions out there on how to make them work. Ndiswrapper might have drivers but I was able to use the one that came with the wireless card itself.

LinuxGuru707 · 08-04-2006, 05:53 PM

ok i got ndiswrapper installed in suse 10.1 but for some reason I cant find the program. is there a command that I can type from the terminal to get it started. I have looked in yast and in startup menu. Thank you

zetabill · 08-04-2006, 10:50 PM

Sure... whether you downloaded the "linux-tested" driver from the ndiswrapper page or you use the driver that came with the card, you should have a .sys file and a .inf file. Put them both in the same directory and cd into that directory.

As root you would do the following:

Code:

ndiswrapper -i *.inf

where *.inf is the name of the .inf file for ndiswrapper to load up the file.

If you don't get any errors, and the card is plugged in or operational, you'll want to make sure that the drivers are working. I'll use an example from my setup:

Code:

ndiswrapper -l
Installed drivers:
lsbcmnds                driver installed, hardware present

If you get the "driver installed, hardware present" output, then the driver recognizes the card and ndiswrapper recognizes the driver. You can go ahead and create an alias so that you can actually use the card properly:

Code:

ndiswrapper -m

I'm not sure how Suse is set up but this should all work properly. It's possible that there might be a different process for that distro so if anything looks a little funny then search around the fora for that "one extra step" but I'm pretty sure that you won't have any problems along those lines.

That should work properly, though, so I don't think you'll have any other problems. Always keep an eye on the native linux drivers though. If for some reason the native drivers become fully functional I would recommend using those. Until then, you shouldn't have any problems with this driver unless it's documented. I have not had any problems with mine. If you want to look into WPA or WEP encryption I'm sure that Suse has something in Yast that I don't know about so I wouldn't be a very good reference for that.

Good luck.

LinuxGuru707 · 08-05-2006, 12:13 AM

is there also a utility to start the wlan or will ndiswrapper take care of this for me?

LinuxGuru707 · 08-05-2006, 12:16 AM

is there also a utility to start the wlan or will ndiswrapper take care of this for me?

zetabill · 08-05-2006, 01:25 AM

You should use the utility to manage the connections. Ndiswrapper just sets up the driver and creates an interface that can be used by said utility. I know from when I used Fedora. I had to do what I did in the last post with ndiswrapper but as far as managing the connection (encryption, start/stop, interface selection) that was taken care of by the utility. It shouldn't be too hard once ndiswrapper is set up. Just as long as the interface ndiswrapper creates shows up in the utility. If you don't want to use that utility then you'd have to use ifconfig and iwconfig but I'm sure that the utility is easier.