Laptops :: compaq armada sb and pcmcia wireless

I picked up this armada sb laptop with mmx200 processor, 98mb ram, and a 3gb hard drive. I seems to be working great with DSL. I have no internet... it only has a phone jack(no ethernet) so I picked up a hobo 802.11b pcmcia wifi card with what I believe is a realtek rtl8139 chipset. I found some drivers that require me to compile. The one of the two that seemed to make some sense to me also looks like I may need to create a new kernel dir and recompile it also. I am giving this to my 10yr old daughter and she is getting anxious. I also have a win driver disk with .inf files but even ndiswrapper didn't work. please respond with needed details and I will promptly reply.

Andy

Hi Andy,

did you have a look at the ndiswrapper card list here?
On the installation page they recommend not to use the drivers that were delivered with the card, but instead to use drivers that have already been tested. Stated here
So maybe you should try this before doing the whole compiling stuff. AFAIK the 8139 is an ethernet chipset, maybe your card has the 8180, which can be found in the list dozens of times reported as working flawless with ndiswrapper...?

Thanks for the response... You happen to be right, as I was messing around with ndiswrapper and the supplied drivers, I thought I was getting close and one of the outputs listed it as an 8180. I will check it out and post back.

Too cool! It looks like I had my setup pretty close, but the correct driver and following the entire configuration finally worked, thanks.

original here.