Alright, before anyone gets POed, yes I searched, yes, I'm a newb (first install, no previous linux knowledge, FNG), yes I'm an idiot, yes I deserve severe flaming, but nevertheless, I still need a wee bit o help. I just installed Mandrake 10.1 in a dual-boot situation with WinXP on my Dell 500m laptop, and I can't get either of my wireless cards going, I have the built in dell TrueMobile 1400 and a Linksys WPC54G (they use the same chipset, so stands to reason they both would not be working). Anyhow, I read up a bit on the forums here, and elsewhere, and found out that some folks were able to use ndiswrapper and use their Win drivers to run the card. Well, I've been f'king with ndiswrapper for about 2 hours now, and still can't get either card recognized. I got ndiswrapper 1.1 installed (after much nooblet oriented confusion), and tried the instructions from ndiswrapper.sourceforge and I've gotten as far as installing the .inf file, but when I type 'ndiswrapper -l' to view my drivers, it says they're all 'invalid drivers', I can't go on to the 'load module' step, and my cards still don't work. Is there any way, short of buying a new card (I'd really like to use the built in one if possible) of getting ndiswrapper to work with my damn driver?

The Truemobile cards are PRISM based...

You'll either need to alias the standard kernel modules and add the required modules to /etc/modprobe.preload & /etc/modules.conf, or you'll need to do the same thing with the PRISM2 drivers.

The Linksys are a different beast altogether...

Hint:

Punctuation, linefeed/cr's and whitespace, help get your thoughts accross, and permit you to get answers back.

At the sourceforge project site, and as I later found out from the console, my TrueMobile 1400 internal mini-pci is broadcom based (BCM 4309), uses the same chipset and Windows driver as my WPC54G. I made a little progress, I finally got the correct driver installed, I type in ndiswrapper -l and it lists the bcmwl5 driver 'present' and 'hardware present', but now when I type 'modprobe ndiswrapper' (the next step, according to the ndiswrapper instructions) I get: 'FATAL: Error inserting ndiswrapper (/lib/modules/2.6.8.1-12mdk/misc/ndiswrapper.ko): Invalid module format' . I read that it might be because of the acx100 module, so I got rid of it per instructions from another forum, uninstalled ndiswrapper, re-installed it and did it all again, and it always gives me that message when I get to the 'modprobe ndiswrapper' part. If anybody could gimme a hand I'd appreciate it. I'm puncuating and describing things as best I can, but my install is less than 3 days old, this is my first experience with linux, and I've never done this before, so bear with me.

White spaces!!!!

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A good thing!

Well you are making a LOT of progress.

The warning you got is normally the result of one of several things....

The install script may have created a .ko file when what you need is a .ko.gz file in the target directory.

CD to that directory...

then

gzip NAMEOFFILE.ko

This will create the .ko.gz file

Now

depmod -a

Which should probe it for unresolved symbols and spit out any errors. If none you are one your way...

Next try "modprobe ndiswrapper" and follow the directions for

ndiswrapper -l

Note the commands "ndiswrapper -h".

Do the one which installs the driver and the other command that adds the modprobe entries.

Then if ndiswrapper reports that the hardware has been found you are just about done...

Reboot, once you have rebooted you should be able to "modprobe ndiswrapper" (only the first time this may be required) and go into the Mandrake Control Center.

In the Mandrake Control Center your WiFi card will appear like any other LAN/Wireless card and you can then use the wizard or the gui to finish setting it up.

Hey,

Ahh, white spaces, I get it now. I didn't realize what that meant before

I did what you said, and now the driver is installed, I was able to insert the module with the CORRECT format, very nice... And now all I have left to do is set it up.

Thanks alot for your help. I know what a pain in the ass it can be helping dumb newbies (one of my other hobbies is paintball, and I spend a probably unhealthy amount of time on marker tech forums tyring to explain simple things to dumb newbs), so I really appreciate you taking the time to gimme a hand. And I hope you're not tired of it yet, because I've just begun using linux for the first time, and I expect to have serveral more similar threads posted within the next few weeks

Excellent!

Glad to see you have it running.

You can also add an alias to the card in /etc/modules.conf if it's not already there.

I called mine wlan0 so that the utilities would automatically recognize it...

I forget the exact syntax as I'm not in front of a machine at the moment...