Using ndiswrapper with my wireless card
 

(Note: This may belong in the SuSE board, but it doesn't seem to me like there's a whole lot of SuSE-specific stuff in it. But I may be wrong.)

Howdy. I'm a complete newbie to Linux, and I just got SuSE 10.1 running earlier today (after having used Mandriva One version 2006.0 for a couple months). I have a Linksys WPC54G wireless card, which evidently doesn't have a driver for Linux, so I'm trying to get it running with ndiswrapper. I just can't seem to get it to work, though, because I only have a vague idea of what I'm doing.

I installed an RPM of ndiswrapper and followed the instructions on this page. I already have the .sys and .inf files on a floppy disk (I'd had to track them down for the Mandriva installation before), so I entered ndiswrapper -i /media/floppy/lsbcmnds.inf in a console. Thereafter, running ndiswrapper -l returned:

lsbcmnds driver installed, hardware present

So far, so good. I typed depmod -a and modprobe ndiswrapper, as per the site's instructions, and neither returned anything. It only said to stop if I got error messages, so I went on. Among the feedback from the next command, dmesg, was:

ndiswrapper: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
ndiswrapper version 1.10 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
ndiswrapper: driver lsbcmnds (The Linksys Group, Inc.,02/14/2005, 3.90.36.0) loaded
[some other stuff]
ndiswrapper: using irq 177
wlan0: vendor: ''
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device [number:number:number:etc.] using driver lsbcmnds, [more numbers and colons.conf]
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP; TKIP with WPA, WPA2, WPA2PSK; AES/CCMP with WPA, WPA2, WPA2PSK

This looked fairly decent to my untrained eye, so I continued with the instructions. iwlist wlan0 scan returned:

wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: [yet more numbers and colons]
ESSID:"WRT54G" [this is indeed the wireless network's name]
Protocol:IEEE 802.11g
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.457 GHz (Channel 10) [this is correct]
Quality:100/100 Signal level:-50 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Bit rates: [a bunch of different Mb/s values]
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:atim=0

It looked pretty good to me, but I wasn't able to go online; my router uses WEP encryption. So I inputted iwconfig wlan0 key open [key] as the instructions said. This returned:

Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

At another suggestion from the instructions, I instead told it to iwconfig wlan0 key open s:[key]. I was feeling a little iffy about it because the instructions recommended that command only "if you want to write the key in ASCII" (I think this may be a reason that this isn't working - does that mean I have to write the WEP key in some sort of computing language?). Anyway, I then inputted ifconfig eth0 down and ifconfig wlan0 up, followed by ndiswrapper -m. After searching these forums for how to make it start up at boot, I followed the advice given in this thread and edited /etc/sysconfig/kernel's MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="" line to read MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="ndiswrapper."

I rebooted the system, and I'm still unable to go online. I think I'm almost there, but I just... don't have the experience to really know what I'm doing. I do think the fact that it gave me an error message when I initially put in the WEP key smells pretty fishy, but again, I'm really not sure. It doesn't help that I can't find any sort of wireless connection setup wizard in YaST...

I really would appreciate any help you could offer!

Ndiswrapper comes packaged with suse and can be installed automatically with everything else. If you went and downloaded a 3rd party rpm, in the future, check if suse already suplies it.

Secondly, stop trying to follow cryptic instructions on a website when you just need to fire up yast and turn on the network card with ndiswrapper as the driver. You don't use the command line to configure anything in suse, just yast.

I used the package manager to install the ndiswrapper RPM from the SuSE installation CD itself. I haven't really played around/familiarized myself with the YaST package manager, since I considered this a more pressing matter. Anyway... how would I find this ndiswrapper setup thing in YaST? That actually was the first place I looked... but I do occasionally miss obvious stuff. I'll try it again tomorrow.

Thanks!

Hmm, I've got it set up in YaST... but it's still not working. Everything looks okay in YaST itself - the module name for wlan0 is ndiswrapper, operating mode is set to managed, ESSID is correct, my WEP key is entered, and it says it starts automatically at boot. But when I type iwconfig wlan0, among what it says is "Encryption key: off" - EVEN THOUGH it's appearing just fine in YaST (with the radio button "Passphrase" selected). Additionally, when I type ifstatus wlan0, it tells me that "dhcpcd is still waiting for data."

So once again, I think there's some sort of problem reading my WEP key. I've tried everything I know to do...*sigh*

Does YAST want the encryption key in ASCII or Hex???

Check into that...

There are three options: passphrase, ASCII, or hexadecimal. I've tried all of them, although I'm not sure which one my router normally wants... Anyway, I'm more concerned about the "Encryption key: off" response; that just doesn't seem right. Is there some way I can enter that without YaST, since it doesn't seem to be recognizing the key YaST gives it?

Okay, now I'm starting to get ticked off. I took away the encryption on my router, and it's still not working. Now the lights on the card are blinking (which they do when there's online activity), but obviously something is still not right because it simply refuses to work. This is what I get when I type iwconfig wlan0:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"WRT54G" Nickname:"localhost"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.457 GHz Access Point: 00:0F:66:2B:B7:FC
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-39 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

How about iwlist wlan0 scan, then?

wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:0F:66:2B:B7:FC
ESSID:"WRT54G"
Protocol:IEEE 802.11g
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.457 GHz (Channel 10)
Quality:0/100 Signal level:-46 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Encryption key:off
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:atim=0

Wonderful. One command says I'm connecting perfectly; the other says there's no connection whatsoever. I'm completely at a loss...

I had these exact same problems under Redhat Enterprise 3 so it's not strictly a Suse problem. I could not get the card working with WEP. I think ultimately that WEP was disabled and an IP acquired with "dhclient wlan0", but if someone with some knowledge in this area could highlight what's going on here and how to fix it, it would be really useful in the future.

It appears your wireless NIC is connected to the wireless router. You may not have an IP address. Not familiar with your distro, but try ifconfig and see if reports anything on wlan0.

The router needs to be set up to automatically provide an IP address, then your computer has to request an IP address. Try "dhclient wlan0" and see what it reports back. Your distro may use a different DHCP client, so you might have to do a little research.

Wireless internet access has two parts: establishing a wireless connection, then establishing an Internet connection. The wireless connection involves the SSID, WEP, WAP, etc. The Internet connection requires that your computer have a valid IP address for the system that you are connected to.

ifconfig returns:

Those addresses are default IP's for routers, aren't they? But I seem to remember mine being 192.168.1.1... And am I misreading it, or did it just tell me it's transferred 26 packets? (I'm sorry, I only have really, really rudimentary knowledge in networking stuff. Obviously.)

dhclient wlan0 returns:

"Address already in use"...? I checked for this "/etc/inetd.conf" file, but it doesn't seem to exist. I'm so confused... Why can't anything ever work like it's supposed to for me? :cry:

There are three computers in this household, all of which can access the Internet with no trouble at all in Windows XP. So I can presume that the router is doing what it's supposed to, right?

Also, do you think putting something in the YaST "Routing" option's "Default Gateway" field would do anything? I'm just sort of looking at all the advanced options in YaST and trying to see if there's anything that might be relevant...