Ndiswrapper seg. faults or hangs with Belkin F5D7000 rev. 20 drivers

TheMusicGuy · 03-21-2007, 12:05 AM

'Allo,

I just bought a Belkin Wireless G Desktop card (F5D7000) and am having very little luck getting it to work with Ndiswrapper. This is as far as I have gotten:

lspci -v :

Code:

...
...
01:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Belkin Unknown device 700f (rev 20)
        Subsystem: Belkin Unknown device 700f
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 9
        I/O ports at 3800 [size=256]
        Memory at e8110400 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

lspci -n :

Code:

...
...
01:0e.0 0200: 1799:700f (rev 20)

ndiswrapper -l :

Code:

installed drivers:
blkwgdv7                driver installed, hardware (1799:700F) present

So for the most part things seem to be going well, but the problem comes when trying to run modprobe ndiswrapper.
1st scenario: On the first try, I get a segfault. Two or three screenfulls of kernel output blazes across the console.
2nd scenario: On subsequent tries, modprobe just hangs. I have to use CTRL-C to kill it. The only way to get back to the 1st scenario is to reboot.

I have tried the drivers that came on the CD, and the ones available at belkin.com. I have tried all Win driver versions except Win2000 because it had no .inf available.

I have also tried the Dell drivers available from the files R74092us.EXE and R81433.EXE. Neither were able to help.

Please note that I have no idea what the chipset of this card is. I know that previous revisions (eg. rev. 03 or rev. 07) used Broadcom or Realtek, but it seems to change with each new revision.

If nobody can help me fix this problem (or at least help me find the chipset of my card) I will probably just return the card and try a different one.

BTW, I'm using Debian with a 2.6.18-4-686 kernel.

Hangdog42 · 03-21-2007, 06:46 AM

Did you compile ndiswrapper yourself or did you install a package? If you didn't compile yourself, I would suggest doing so. It is drop dead easy and prevents a lot of problems. There are excellent instructions on the ndiswrapper wiki.

TheMusicGuy · 03-21-2007, 01:42 PM

I used module assistant. Does that count?
Actually, I followed the instructions listed in the wiki for installing on Debian Etch.

Hangdog42 · 03-21-2007, 04:19 PM

Quote:

I used module assistant. Does that count?

I guess it counts. I've never run into anyone using it before, so I don't know. Segfaults usually mean something is seriously wrong, so I'm going to guess that module assistant isn't doing the trick. Did it throw out any errors? You might just try the usual make/make install and see if that works.

TheMusicGuy · 03-22-2007, 07:25 PM

Okay, so I tried removing all the ndiswrapper packages that had been installed, downloaded ndiswrapper 1.38 src, then ran make, make install (there isn't a configure script that I know of). It seemed to install okay, but I did get a warning about a 4K kernel something. So I went to /usr/src/linux and ran make menuconfig, but I ran into some weird errors:

Code:

/usr/src/linux# make menuconfig
scripts/Makefile.build:17: /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686/scripts/basic/Makefile: No such file or directory
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686/scripts/basic/Makefile'.  Stop.
make: *** [scripts_basic] Error 2

That was using the kernel source that Debian had in its packages catalog. When I tried to use the kernel tarballs from kernel.org the results were even worse.

Also, I tried using modprobe -r ndiswrapper and modprobe ndiswrapper to reinstall the ndiswrapper module but I still got a segfault.

Hangdog42 · 03-23-2007, 06:51 AM

Quote:

(there isn't a configure script that I know of).

You're right about that, ndiswrapper doesn't need the ./configure step.

Quote:

It seemed to install okay, but I did get a warning about a 4K kernel something.

If that was the only warning, it is likely OK. Ndiswrapper is kind of stupid about checking for 4K stacks in that if it doesn't find any evidence that the 4K stacks are NOT set, it complains. This isn't likely to be the problem as Fedora is the only distro that seems to routinely have the 4K stacks in their stock kernels.

Quote:

/usr/src/linux# make menuconfig
scripts/Makefile.build:17: /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686/scripts/basic/Makefile: No such file or directory
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686/scripts/basic/Makefile'. Stop.
make: *** [scripts_basic] Error 2

I'm not sure why you ran make menuconfig, but these errors are suggesting to me that you didn't do a full install of Debian. There should be a kernel headers file that needs to be installed, and not having those is likely the cause of the troubles. If someone familiar with Debian doesn't pipe up in this thread, you might want to ask about this error in a Debian forum and they can likely point you in the proper direction as to what packages seem to be missing.