installing ndiswrapper without pre-existing wired connection
 

Hi there! Thanks for your help in advance.

I'm a complete newbie. Started using Fedora 13 from a liveUSB w/ persistent overlay. My netgear wg511 wireless card is not recognized, so I want to install ndiswrapper. Any tips for doing this, given my situation (liveUSB, no wired connection)? Or is there a work-around that doesn't involve ndiswrapper?

Thank you!

The only way I know to do it is get a friend to download the ndiswrapper tar ball and put it to cd, move it to your machine and do a "tar xvzf ndiswrapper".

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, I have no issue transporting files and I've got the tarball. (This machine is windows, and I get wireless from Windows no problem; I'm just running fedora from liveusb.)

Anyway, there seems to be an issue with the "make" command. Does this mean that I don't have the "development packages" installed? The following is what the terminal spat out, when I tried to run "make" and then "make install." Any help would be appreciated. Is this a simple matter of getting the development packages?--if so, how can I do that?

[liveuser@localhost ndiswrapper-1.56]$ make
make -C driver make[1]: Entering directory `/home/liveuser/Desktop/ndiswrapper-1.56/driver' Makefile:34: *** Cannot find kernel version in /usr/src/kernels/2.6.33.3-85.fc13.i686, is it configured?. Stop. make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/liveuser/Desktop/ndiswrapper-1.56/driver' make: *** [all] Error 2

[liveuser@localhost ndiswrapper-1.56]$ make install
make -C driver install make[1]: Entering directory `/home/liveuser/Desktop/ndiswrapper-1.56/driver' Makefile:34: *** Cannot find kernel version in /usr/src/kernels/2.6.33.3-85.fc13.i686, is it configured?. Stop. make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/liveuser/Desktop/ndiswrapper-1.56/driver' make: *** [install] Error 2 [liveuser@localhost ndiswrapper-1.56]$ ^C [liveuser@localhost ndiswrapper-1.56]$

May be in your distro already. What is it?

Fedora 13 on a liveUSB. Would this perhaps be easier if I used an older fedora release?

Gee, sorry. I guess I can't read.

I might be tempted to boot to some wired computer with that flash drive and get it that way.


Otherwise most rpms can usually be installed locally if you download them. Be sure you get all the ones you'd need or you'll be back and forth.

I don't think so. It looks like when you installed to the liveUSB you didn't include the binaries for ndiswrapper, or they're not part of your distro period.

What rpm is looking for to install ndiswrapper is the kernel source (at first glance) so it can configure itself accordingly. You can manually search redhat.com and grab the relevant kernel-source rpm to install this automatically. Then run the install again to see if you're missing any other dependencies. Or, possibly

I would also suggest going onto Pbone and getting a precompiled RPM and installing (plus dependencies):

http://rpm.pbone.net/

I appreciate all the help, folks!

So I did some experimentation. Apparently it's just that fedora liveUSBs are shotty--it didn't have the development packages thrown in, and it didn't even allow me to switch to root.

However, I made a liveUSB of ubuntu--and on that I was able to run the make/make install perfectly and I installed ndiswrapper from source code. I was subsequently able to install the appropriate driver; however the wireless card still didn't work. If I recall correctly, I was able to run the install and the modprobe, but as for configuring wlan0--the system got stubborn.

Anyway, it seems I made a lot more progress on this with ubuntu than with fedora. And as it turns out, I stumbled across a different thread that stated that even on a liveUSB with a persistent overlay (which I have on both USBs), you still can't install drivers--for whatever reason.

But it's not really an issue anyway, since in two weeks (after my current school term), I'm going to do a clean install of fedora on my hard drive. (currently running only windows xp)

So, here's a toast--another guy just made plans to switch over from windows to linux.