I have read through a few of the ndiswrapper questions and I have a problem that seems a little different:

I downloaded and compiled ndiswrapper 0.8 on Fedora Core 2 cleanly; no other versions were previously installed.

I ran:

$ ndiswrapper -i mn710.inf
$ ndiswrapper -l

and it listed 'mn710' but the string 'present' was missing. I am guessing that this is because ndiswrapper is ready but no device is found.

It is a USB wlan card and I think that has something to do with it. The lights on the card are not on and it seems that FC never probes the device and doesn't really know about it.

I am a newbie and I don't know much about using USB devices under linux. The only USB commands that seemed relevant that I could locate were:

$ lsusb

which showed the name of the device and listed it at

Bus 001:Device 002 -- Microsoft MN710 ...

along with some other devices, and the command:

$ usbmodules --device /proc/bus/usb/001/002

which returned nothing. I don't know how actually relevant those commands are.

Can anyone give me some suggestions how to make the connection with the USB card to ndiswrapper? I've heard other people having success with ndiswrapper and the PCI version of this card, and I have my fingers crossed for the USB version.

I continued with the steps in the INSTALL file just to see what should happen, I ran:

$ modprobe ndiswrapper

which seemed to work fine, a call to:

$ lsmod

displayed ndiswrapper at the top of the list. Running:

$ iwconfig

listed all my other ethernet devices, but no wlan0 or anything similar.

lo no wireless extensions.
sit no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
eth1 no wireless extensions.

Can anyone offer any comments about setting up this USB device in Linux? Is what I need to do even possible? Thanks.

Ike