installing usb wireless network for newbie
 

Hey, Im trying to get my D Link usb wireless network adapter running on an old laptop I received. I wiped the laptop and put on PCLinuxOS 0.93 which says it does come with ndiswrapper. My DLink adapter is the DWL-G122 revision A2.

I have read around on other forums and threads about using ndiswrapper but Im not sure how to use it,Im a noob. I understand that I have to do something with using the Windows driver and getting it to work with ndiswrapper but Im not sure how to do that. What Im asking for is either some reply help or a link to a good and easy to understand tutorial for me to use.

Thanks

Start here; http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...Windows_driver

I have tried that and now this time I finally found the .inf file to use with it. I can get to the steps until until I get to loading ndiswrapper. When I type the command modprobe ndiswrapper I get an error saying Where did I screw up?

Untar the file;

cd /lib/modules/2.6.16.27.tex1.lve/kernel/3rdparty/ndiswrapper/
tar zxvf ndiswrapper.ko.gz


Or build you own version, you will need your kernel source or kernel headers, the instructions are at the link I already provided.

it doesnt seem to want to find the device no matter what commands i put in. since its a old laptop(over 7 years) and usb im using could i maybe have to mount it?:confused:

and could it be a problem that i get the following output
the invalid driver part?

Did you download both the .inf and .sys files for the windows ndis driver?
This site's wiki has a wireless section as well that covers installing and using ndiswrapper.
I wonder if your installation of ndiswrapper and the ndiswrapper kernel module was completed successfully.

First, the kernel module doesn't seem to be a tar file as "Lenard" posted. Try:
instead. This will uncompress the file to "ndiswrapper.ko". Just for your information, .o are object files. .ko files indicate to you that the file is a kernel module as well.
Look at the output of "uname -r". Does it display "2.6.16.27.tex1.lve". This is the version of your running kernel. For each kernel installed, there is a corresponding /lib/modules/<version>/ directory where the kernel modules for that kernel are installed. If this is your only kernel, then the answer is probably yes.

If the installation of ndiswrapper wasn't completed successfully, try running these commands, just in case:
sudo /sbin/depmod -a
sudo /sbin/ldconfig
sudo /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m

The first one should have been done during the installation of ndiswrapper. The second one may not do anything useful in your case. It adds new library paths that may have been added during an installation. It may actually be done periodically in the background or when you boot. But doing it anyway manually sometimes helps.
The third command installs an /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper file which adds an alias for wlan0. It may instead add the line to /etc/modprobe.conf. If it was already done, it will tell you so, and the error message saying the alias exists isn't anything to worry about.

Being a USB device, your system also needs USB related kernel modules loaded. They probably are, but it is something to consider. A listing from "sudo /sbin/lsmod" will list the kernel modules that are loaded. If the "modprobe ndiswrapper" part succeeds, you will see that one of the listed modules is "ndiswrapper".

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ps. I wrote this from memory. I hope I got the paths to lsmod, ndiswrapper, depmod and ldconfig correct. You may also cd to root first instead of using "sudo". Most often, to use sudo, you may need to add yourself to the "wheel" group, and then run "visudo" as root to allow the wheel group to run "sudo". This entails finding the commented line and removing the initial "# " characters to uncomment it. After that sudo should work for you. Some distro's like Ubuntu will have this part done already, and using Ubuntu, you need to use sudo to run commands as root. This is a good thing actually.
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Display the version of ndiswrapper that you are using. There is one version that had problems and wouldn't load in the corresponding kernel module. I know this because it is the version that SuSE 10.1 used initially. I uninstalled the systems ndiswrapper version and ndiswrapper kernel module and installed ndiswrapper from source. This sites wiki and the ndiswrapper wiki have instructions to do that.
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Make sure you didn't download a windows driver for 64 bit if you have a 32 bit computer. Also, if you still have problems wrapper the windows driver, or the driver doesn't seem to work, you can go to the ndiswrapper wiki, locate your device and download the driver that is known to work from the supplied link.

This means that it is the wrong driver for the device.

You might want to visit; http://jbnote.free.fr/prism54usb/

Or try the driver here; http://support.dlink.com/products/vi...DG122%5FrevA2#

Note: you might want to copy the PRISMA02.cat and PRISMA02.inf files to the WinXP directory and try again.

Thanks for the help guys, I got it working now.

What I did was I went and downloaded a different driver and reinstalled ndiswrapper. I then reboot my laptop and it was all working fine.

Glad you got it working.

FYI: all you needed to do was, or in the future:
Shutdown the device; ifdown eth1
Stop the network service; service network stop
Uninstall the current driver; ndiswrapper -e PRISMA02
Install the new driver; ndiswrapper -i Something.inf
Restart the network service; service network start