If I had a hammer, I would beat this laptop until it was a pile of dust....luckily I don't have a hammer handy. I might have to install Windows so I can use this damn thing at school...ARGH.

Anyway, has anyone had any luck with ndiswrapper, a DLink card, and either Mandrake 9.2 or 10? I've tried ndiswrapper .9 and .10 on both Mandrake 9.2 and 10 with the same results. I can install ndiswrapper. The driver installation is fine. When I run ndiswrapper -l i get a "cannot locate lspci" warning, but it shows that the driver is installed. I then modprobe ndiswrapper and usually after the third or fourth cycle of rmmod then modprobe, ndiswrapper finally activates my card. Once it's active, I have to go through the iwconfig settings to get my card connected. Once the key and auth mode settings are all set, my card shows that a connection has been established. I can do a ifconfig wlan0 up, and it shows up in my ifconfig. And then I lose the connection...the card is still active but disconnected. I run iwconfig and whaddya know, my key and auth mode have been changed. I can't change to anything but managed mode, I can't set rts or frag or threshold--it says device wlan0 not present. Ridiculous. Also, when I try to run ifup wlan0, i get the following:
Determining IP information for wlan0... failed; no link present. Check cable?

Oh yeah...one time it worked for about 5 minutes. I didn't have to run ifup wlan0--I just set the key and authorization mode, ran ifconfig wlan0 up and was online. For 5 minutes. Then the connection dropped, i checked iwconfig and viola...I somehow had a new key and auth mode. Who knows....Also, I can't get wlan0 to start at boot--it says ndiswrapper device is not present, delaying initialization. Someone please help. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Mandrake 9.2, 10, Slack 9.1, Mandrake 9.1, and ndiswrapper .9 and .10 too many times to count now...but I can't do another semester running Windows.

-Kris

Well, with Mandrake 10, ndiswrapper 0.4 comes installed, which means that if you want to use a later version you need to remove the ndiswrapper module from /lib/modules/kernelversion/misc otherwise you may get conflicts. Personally, I stopped upgrading ndiswrapper after 0.7 due to a signficant number of problems that seemed to creep into the software. You might want to try an earlier version of ndiswrapper and see if it works. You also might want to try an older windows driver if you've downloaded a new one from the net. Sometimes older windows drivers work better than newer ones. Unfortunately, getting cards to work with ndiswrapper can be a trial and error situation. However, you should never need to re-install your distro.

I think I'll try an older version of ndiswrapper. I've heard that alot of people had problems when .8 came out, so I guess I'll try .6 or .7. I did remove the version that came with Mandrake 10, and I don't think that 9.2 came with it, so I should be OK there. Maybe I'll try the driver from the installation CD that came with the card--I did get the latest version of the driver online, but it was one of the listed drivers for the firmware revision on my card. Who knows. At least I have something different to try. As for the distro reinstalling--that was out of pure frustration--it gave me an hour break from constantly resetting my iwconfig settings...lol. Anyway, thanks for the help.
-Kris