Hi I am having trouble trying to get my wmp54g wireless network card to install using ndiswrapper 8. I did make install and that went very smoothly then I did ndiswrapper -i and the location of my xp drivers. That went well also. Usually when I do the ndiswrapper -l to list what is installed, it said "bcmwl5.inf" but never said "present". I did the modrprobe after that and then the iwconfig but it didn't recognize any devices. I have tried it over and over again and now I am stuck at the ndiswrapper -l part. Now when I type this in I get the error:

Can't use string (**) as an array ref while "strict refs" in use at /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper line 324, <LS2> line 1.

I can't seem to get past this and even when I was able to in the first place my device wasn't able to be located. Any suggestions would be great. I am new to linux so PLEASE try and keep it as simple as possible. Thank you!



Okay despite the can't use string error I tried the iwconfig again and it seemed to work this time. Now I need help setting up the rest of the settings. I have no clue what to do. My iwconfig message is as follows:

lo no wireless extensions
sit0 no wireless extensions
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID: "linksys"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point:........
Power Managementff
Link Quality:100/100 Signal Llevel:-71 dbm Noise level: -256 dbm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:2 Invalid misc:2813 Missed beacon:0

Also I did a dmesg and it said
wlan0:ndiswrapper ethernet device ......
wlan0: no IPv6 routers present

Thanks for the help

Frequently the lack of "present" means that the driver you are using and ndiswrapper are having a hard time communicating. There are a couple of things you can try

-get a different .inf and .sys file. Sometimes the newer versions of drivers give ndiswrapper trouble
-Drop back to ndiswrapper 0.7. In some cases that solves the problem.

If your card seems to be working despite the errors, you can configure it with the iwconfig command. You'll want to read through man iwconfig, but the man commands are

iwconfig interface essid YourAPSSIDHere
iwconfig interface key YourWEPKeyHere

Interface is whatever name your wireless card has (wlan0?) and you use the key only if you are using WEP encryption.

Once you have the card configured with iwconfig, you need to get an IP address. That is usually done with either the dhclient command or the dhcpcd command. Since Slackware is one of the few distros using dhcpcd, I'll assume that you use dhclient. Then the command is dhclient interface. Just replace interface with your card name.

If that goes well, you should be connected to your AP and can surf away.

Thanks so much it worked great!!!
I did iwconfig wlan0 essid linksys
then dhclient and that loaded my IP address
then I did ifconfig wlan0 up
and that loaded it.

In case someone else with this card stumbles on this thread, could you please elaborate a bit on what worked great?

one more question, How do I make it load on every boot up? I tried editing the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local and it froze up every time at the login. After about ten to fifteen minutes it finally logged in and the internet worked but there has to be a better way. I also noticed that when my network card is loaded my other programs like Kwrite, mozilla, Konqueror and others seem to freeze or lag. Any explanations or maybe it is because I am using the mandrake 10 community edition.
Thank you

The lag could be a number of things. For instance, Mandrake 10 comes with the 0.4 version of ndiswrapper installed. If you didn't remove the old module from /lib/modules/kernel then you may be having some conflicts. I think there is a bit in the ndiswrapper FAQ about what file to remove.

Otherwise, try each step in a console before adding it to your rc.local and figure out which command is causeing the problem.

I don't think that the old ndiswrapper is the problem because I checked and it is not installed on my computer. My cd's don't have that rpm. Also I am pretty sure the computer lagging has nothing to do with that local file because I changed it back to what it was originally and it is still lagging. I just had formatted and installed mandrake before it started lagging so maybe I installed some conflicting rpms so I am going to reinstall again with fewer rpm's selected. Hopefully this will fix the problem.

Everything works great until I dhclient and then ifconfig wlan0 up.
As soon as I do that everthing starts lagging. I restart so the the network is once again disabled and everything is working fine again. That is until I I want to use the internet and my network card. Any suggestions. I have tried ndiswrapper 8,6, and .4 I don't think that is the problem. Maybe I can do that dhcpcd thing?
Thanks for the help

Hm. One thing to try would be to run top in one window and then run dhclient and ifconfig from a second. Wait a little bit between those commands and see what rises to the top of top. Both dhclient and ifconfig are transient commands, they shouldn't cause lagging. You could try dhcpcd, but since Mandrake normally uses dhclient (I think) I would do that only as a last resort. In theory they do the same thing, namely look for a dhcp server, try to get an IP address and then either get one or fail. In either case, it shouldn't stick around to cause trouble.

sorry for the delay. Umm I did the top thing then did the dhclient. I didn't notice really anything happen in top but I will paste what it says in this message. Before even doing the ifconfig I tried opening a program that didn't lag at all before I did the dhclient (kwrite) and it lagged and took like five minutes to open. I'm really confused and all out of ideas. Thanks again for sticking with me and helping me out

top - 14:32:51 up 1 day, 14:36, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
Tasks: 74 total, 2 running, 72 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3% us, 0.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.3% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 904996k total, 416576k used, 488420k free, 62828k buffers
Swap: 506008k total, 0k used, 506008k free, 231796k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
14868 matt 16 0 2172 1044 1964 R 0.7 0.1 0:00.94 top
2449 matt 15 0 26716 14m 24m S 0.3 1.6 0:00.37 kdeinit
1 root 16 0 1580 516 1424 S 0.0 0.1 0:03.14 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:21.15 events/0
4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.07 kblockd/0
5 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kapmd
6 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
7 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
8 root 25 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kswapd0
9 root 10 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
11 root 19 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
15 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.05 kjournald
121 root 18 0 2168 1324 1588 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.30 devfsd
247 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
709 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.66 kjournald
1266 rpc 16 0 1712 580 1540 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 portmap
.................................................................................................... ...............

Well, nothing obvious is consuming your CPU time. OK here is a somewhat offbeat suggestion. Are your ISPs DNS servers listed in your /etc/resolv.conf file? If not, you may want to enter them and see if that improves performance. Another possibility would be that your firewall is getting in the way. You could take it down temporarily and see if that improves performance. If so, there is your culprit.

I don't think that any of that is the problem. If my firewall was the problem then my internet would lag not my software. I tried to install a newer driver than the one that I had for it. I downloaded one off the linksys webpage and loaded it but it would not let me change the essid. I read all the other threads on this and couldn't figure it out. I tried once again to download a different one and when I tried to change the essid it just says
ESSIDff/any
It is really weird. I think it is a hardware conflict though for sure. Any other suggestions?

When it comes to using Windows drivers with ndiswrapper, newer is not always better. In fact older drivers tend to work better. I think early versions of drivers adhere more closely to the official API, but as time goes on the driver writers find tricks that work better and use those. While the driver may work better in Windows, it actually works worse with ndiswrapper.

One trick I have seen with some drivers is that setting the mode to Auto rather than Managed allows the ESSID to be set.

To be honest, I'm not buying your hardware conflict theory unless you've got some evidence to back it up. If you were having a conflict, you would be seeing the problem in your syslog file.

Otherwise, I stand by my earlier suggestion. Try taking down your firewall and see if that clears up the lag.

whatever you say hangdog42. I will try it. I really appreciate you helping me out. I didn't mean to insult you, so if I did I am sorry.

Okay then what is the easiest way to disable my firewall. I have no programs running on any computer like norton personal firewall and the encryption key is turned off on linux. I went ahead and loaded the original dirvers that came with my card. Thanks for the advice about the new drivers. I would never have guessed that. I have the Linksys WRT54g router. I will look online at the linksys site to see what they say. Thanks again and I will keep you posted.

Okay just checked and according to linksys you cannot disable the built in firewall on this model router. It mentioned something about using port forwarding or port triggering. Any suggestions... or is this a dumb question

by the way. My brother had this same wireless router on his computer and he had no problems running linux with it. Then again he wasn't using it wirelessly but was pluggen directly into into it.