Alright guys and gals...I'm a new member to the Linux community. I'm finally trying to make a switch from Windows to Linux - or at least give Linux a shot. I just downloaded the newest release of Fedora Core - FC4. I installed it on an older desktop, which is a Compaq DeskPro PIII 900MHz with 512MB RAM. I am having a problem configuring the wireless card that I installed in the machine. It is a Linksys WMP11. I am trying to install the card driver using ndiswrapper. I successfully installed the driver, and FC4 confirms this. However, I get an error message after I configure the card's settings and try to activate it. The message states, "ndiswrapper device does not seem to be present." Everything seems to be in order, from what I can see, and this message does not come up if I activate the Ethernet card in the computer. I've tried 3 different versions of ndiswrapper with no luck, following the installation instructions along with the guidance of a friend very carefully. I've also tried moving the card to a different PCI slot in my machine to be sure it was not a hardware problem. I'm totally stumped, and would appreciate any help and knowledge that anyone may have. If you need any other information, let me know and I'll get it for you.


Thanks in advance,
Joe

Does "ndiswrapper -l" give you driver present, hardware present?
Did you do "modprobe ndiswrapper"?

first, do an "ndiswrapper -e [insert wlan card here]". then, as root, run "gedit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0". paste this in that file:

DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
onBOOT=no
MODE=Managed
ESSID=any

then reinstall your card with ndiswrapper like you did before. make sure you run "ndiswrapper -m" before you run "modprobe ndiswrapper". if you want your wlan card to be your primary network connection, change the "onBOOT" value above to "yes", and then run "gedit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0" and change the "onBOOT" value to "no".

let me know if this works for you.

-matt

ps. using the latest version of ndiswrapper works quite well with fedora core.

Thanks guys for all of your help. I first tried to answer the questions that darkleaf asked. When I do a "ndiswrapper -l" the machine says "lsbcmnds driver present." That is the driver for the wireless card, and this shows that the driver is installed. However, it does not say that the hardware is present, hence my strange error message. All the times I installed this, I used "modprobe ndiswrapper."

Now, on to what coolpyrofreak suggested. I followed all of these steps carefully. In short, I still get the error message (even after restart). Here is what my machine said after each of the steps:

"ndiswrapper -e [insert wlan card here]":
I inserted both "wlan0" and "lsbcmnds" there. When I inserted "wlan0," it returned "Driver wlan0 is not installed. Use -l to list the installed drivers." I did the "ndiswrapper -l" and it returned "lsbcmnds driver present." When I inserted "lsbcmnds" there, it returned nothing, so I assume that I wasn't supposed to insert that there.

Paste into file:
Alright, I did this successfully. There was already some stuff in there, I left everything and modified the items listed here. The only one that got changed was BOOTPROTO, which was set to "none" for some reason.

Reinstall ndiswrapper:
I did the same way I have been in the past, including running "ndiswrapper -m" before running "modprobe ndiswrapper".

Change ONBOOT:
I changed this to yes, because this will be the only adapter I use with this system for a while. I noticed that, when I boot FC4, it says the same error message under ndiswrapper when it is booting up with a red [FAILED] next to it.

I am using the latest version of ndiswrapper - version 1.2. I downloaded it off of SourceForge.

Anyone have any other ideas for me?



Thanks,
Joe

Thanks guys for all of your help. I first tried to answer the questions that darkleaf asked. When I do a "ndiswrapper -l" the machine says "lsbcmnds driver present." That is the driver for the wireless card, and this shows that the driver is installed. However, it does not say that the hardware is present, hence my strange error message. All the times I installed this, I used "modprobe ndiswrapper."

well, it's a pci card, so first do lspci-n
this should give you the id of the device (if not, the device is simply not present)
then do "ndiswrapper -a deviceid drivername
Where deviceid is the id of the device according to lspci and drivername is the name of the driver according to ndiswrapper -l

hope this helps