Help getting wireless card to work with VMWare
 

BT3 wasn't working so I got the trial for VMWare and it works perfectly, except that I don't know how to let BT3 use my wireless card. It worked outside of VMWare.
In the Virtual Network Setting - Host Virtual Network of the Edit menu of the VMware, the ethernet and wireless cards are recognize.
Went I do a lspci and a iwconfig in the BT3 this is what I get:
bt ~ # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 01)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 01)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 08)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 08)
00:0f.0 VGA compatible controller: VMware Inc Abstract SVGA II Adapter
00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 01)
00:11.0 PCI bridge: VMware Inc Unknown device 0790 (rev 02)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE] (rev 10)
02:01.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 02)
02:02.0 USB Controller: VMware Inc Abstract USB2 EHCI Controller
bt ~ # iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

The ethernet controller is detect but he wireless no [00:11.0 PCI bridge: VMware Inc Unknown device 0790 (rev 02)].
What can I do?
Thanks

The virtual card in VMware guest machines isn't wireless, so you can't use it to access the features of a wireless card. You might be able to make a USB wireless card available to a guest machine via the USB connections, but I'm not sure how well that would work.

Hi,

You can get a Ethernet but you can forget about using a wireless connection.

Vmware does not deal with specific network hardware. You can not direclty access a wireless card any more than you can directly access any other PCI device.

The host operating system handles the wireless connection.

Vmware provides a number of networking options, one of which is bridging, the other is put the machine on a local subnet with a NAT gateway. You should study them, but either will allow the VM to use the internet connection on the host.

As far as bit torrent goes? If that is what you mean by BT3, it is sort of silly to run that in a Windows VM, because it is well supported in linux.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Hi,
BT3 is BackTrack3.
My router connection works at the same time in the host(windows) and in the guest(VMware-linux). I have understand than throughout BT3 the wireless card works too, thats way I upload BT3 in the Vmware as a virtual machine. I have been trying throughout ndiswrapper that the controller of the wireless card be recognize. The most I have advance is that the driver bcmwl5.inf(my card is a Dell mini pci wireless wlan 1390, my LT is a Dell inspiron 6400)is detected by BT3, but no the machine bcmwl5.sys.
If Hangdog42 is right, I dont not if I should expend more time trying, and instead do it with a USB connection.

One of the major ideas behind virtual machines is that you are isolating the guest OS from the physical hardware. They don't meet at any time, but rather the physical hardware is presented through a virtual layer. It is one of the reasons why you can copy a VM between different machines and still have it work with minimal configuration.


That's right and you've almost certainly had to set up either a bridge or a NAT connection between your physical wireless card and the virtual one your guest OS sees.

From BT3, you can't do that because as a guest, BT3 never sees ndiswrapper. It only sees the virtual device, which isn't the wireless card.

Ah, I did not fully understand the problem at the time. You are having trouble getting your wireless card working, and were trying to use windows native drivers.

Your best bet is to get a pcmcia wireless card with good linux support. USB ones have very poor linux support, and virtually plugged into the vmware machine it will probably work... but not well.