I tried to install my Linksys USB wireless adapter; but according to the system log, not only did Ndiswrapper fail to load, but Mandrake didn't even detect it. It detected eth0, my Ethernet adapter, but there was no eth1 (should have been the wireless adapter). I also installed my other wireless device, a PCI card (I have it because I'm going to switch over), but it wasn't detected either. It has to be a problem with Mandrake and not the devices, because my other distributions (Xandros, Knoppix) found them.

Which version of mandrake have you got? 10.2 has better support.

My version is 10.1. Really, is 10.2 that advanced over 10.1?

Did you check out http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ for help on installing it.
I got mine to work on versions as early as 10.0 on my Dell laptop using that site.

I think all the distros are finally getting better support for wireless. I belive some even come installed with ndiswrapper and a few nic drivers. I think 10.2 is very much improved over 10.1

I finally found an easy way to get my wireless working with Mandriva. I have had great success with both 10.1 and 10.2 official.

Check ndiswrapper lists to see if your nic is on their list of supported cards.

This is all I had to do to get my wireless going in mandriva. Mandriva comes with a ndiswrapper installed and is set for mandriva so I would strongly suggest using that version.

If you use the version that comes with Mandriva this is all I had to do to get my card working.

Install ndiswrapper from Mandrake Control Center.
Copy the window drivers to a directory in linux
do the ndiswrapper -i xxxxxx.inf to install drivers.
ndiswrapper -m to install the alias
modprobe ndiswrapper to install ndiswrapper as a module.
Setup my card in Mandrake Control center.
edit the /etc/modprobe.preload file and put the line "ndiswrapper" in it

that was it. I didn't have to load the kernel source. I didn't have to use the ifconfig commands. It's quite painless really, but if you dowload the ndiswrapper files then I think you have to edit a file to make sure your kernel - source is the same. It's a real pain installing the download version.
Trust me......

The .rpm for ndiswrapper that comes with Mandrake 10.1 is crap and doesn't work, install it from source, it's super easy, even for a beginner, just follow the installation wiki. The .rpm in 10.2 works fine, but the one for 10.1 loads the wrong version. It's supposed to be 0.9, but if you do a dmesg is comes back "ndiswrapper 0.8 loaded", so something's just screwed up with it. I spent a week wrangling with it when I first installed 10.1, installed it from source, bang, working wireless card. Mandrake won't recognize your wireless device until ndiswrapper is installed and configured and you load the module it creates. If you use ndiswrapper, your devices will likely come up wlanX by the way, not ethX.

Thank you; that answers a lot, because I had noticed that Ndiswrapper 1.2 installed 0.8, and I had no idea why.

By installing from source, you mean patching the kernel, don't you? Just making sure.

While I am on this subject, I hope you can clear up something else for me. I noticed that two different RPM's of the latest Ndiswrapper were available: one had extension .i586.rpm, and the other, .src.rpm. What would be the difference?

Wlanx vs. Ethx? I see...I was looking for an eth1 because the only time I got my equipment working (in Xandros), the connection was called eth1 even though it was wireless.

OK...I have uncompressed the Ndiswrapper tar.gz, but received these errors when I typed make:




make -C driver
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/josh/ndiswrapper-1.3rc1/driver'
Can't find kernel sources in /lib/modules/2.6.8.1-12mdk/build;
give the path to kernel sources with KSRC=<path> argument to make
make[1]: *** [prereq_check] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/josh/ndiswrapper-1.3rc1/driver'
make: *** [all] Error 2

hello my friend, linksys IMO is a pain. dont bother with tech support either. they dislike linux and then they had me try to run win commands for some reason. but it came in my notebook and it is working really well.
now to the problem at hand.
2005 has good wifi and 2006B3 was a breeze.
goto software installer and select kernel-source. that will load what you need. from there it will all be down hill.

I would be willing to change, but it's my father who has the router that I have to connect with, and he chose Linksys (because it guarantees backwards compatibility). At that time, I hadn't yet decided to try Linux, so Linux compatibility was not an issue.

dont get me wrong linksys is good hardware. i just dont like their support. after you install the source and ndiswrapper you shouldnt have a problem.
be sure to post back and let us know how it goes

Well I see you got installing from source all figured out. It's really just building and compiling the program from the source code. The error you're running into is that you don't have kernel sources installed. If you go to Mandrake Control Center>Software Management>Install Software there should be an .rpm package called kernel-sources2.6.8.11-mdk, or something similar. Install that, and you should be able to install no problem.

For the .rpms, the .i586 one's are the one's you want. src.rpm's are source code distributed in .rpm packages.

If your last distro automatically detected your hardware, that's probably why it labeled it ethX, but when you use ndiswrapper, it will probably create the alias wlanX (since you have two wireless devices, it should be wlan0 and wlan1). It's not a big deal, when you finish installing ndiswrapper, you just run the command iwconfig and see what connections you find (should show eth0, some other stuff, then all your wireless extensions).

If you get too frustrated with ndiswrapper, or can't get it working, there is also a program called linuxant driver loader, which is non-free software, that accomplishes the same thing, but is easier to install and run (all graphical). If you want to check it out it's $20 for a permanent license and the site is here: https://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/

I contemplated plunking down the money when I first installed ndiswrapper. At the time I was on my first intallation and had never used a linux command line before. But I stuck to my mission to try linux, and try it at no cost, and after a little learning, all went well. Not like I'm a seasoned pro or anything, that was only like 4 months ago

That worked...I now have kernel sources installed. But my wireless equipment still doesn't work: lsmod indicates that the module was loaded, but dmesg still reports an error. The last line was this:

ndiswrapper (ndiswrapper_load_driver:93): loadndiswrapper failed (65280); check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver' [The system log did not have any lines referring to "loadndisdriver" that I saw.]

It's clearly not the same error: the system log used to report error code 256, whatever that was.

Did you uninstall the old version first? You'll want to uninstall the .RPM version if you haven't already, and the one that you tried to compile the first time when you didn't have your sources installed.

Yes, the system log is now referring to Ndiswrapper 1.3 instead of 0.8.