D-Link DWL 520+ via ndiswrapper, system freezing

Forum: Networking
Topic: D-Link DWL 520+ via ndiswrapper, system freezing
started by: boehmerdaniel

Posted by boehmerdaniel on Jan. 08 2006,22:50

Hello DSL-Community,

some days ago I discovered DSL and found out that it's great. Much better than Knoppix. I installed it on an quite old machine with Pentium III (500 MHz) and it's working fine.

Only my wireless NIC doesn't work out of the box, but that's for sure if you buy a cheap one:( However, with the help of the graphical tools in DSL i took me 5 minutes to get the card working. I had been testing with SUSE and Debian for *months* and never worked out how to do it. Thanks for your work!

Unfortunately the whole system is freezing after some amount of network traffic. Relating to my network activity it takes some minutes till a whole hour until that point. When the system freezes, *nothing* works anymore. No mouse movings, no console change (Ctrl-Alt-Fx), no Ctrl-Alt-Del)... After rebooting and reparing the FS, the system works fine again -- until the next "winter":)

I take it it's a problem with ndiswrapper and the kernel (because *nothing* works). So I give you as many information as possible:
- card is D-Link DWL 520+ (22 Mbit/s) with driver for 2000 and XP tested
- system is based on Award BIOS, CPU Pentium III with 500 MHz and about 128 MB RAM

Thanks for any advice
Daniel Böhmer, Germany

Posted by roberts on Jan. 08 2006,23:49

I don't have that card, so I can't be sure. But when I hear 128MB ram, and freezing after an hour net activity, makes me think... What is your browser cache set to? How much free ram is available while performing this net activity? How much swap do you have?

Posted by plinej on Jan. 09 2006,00:14

I think the problem may be with the version of ndiswrapper working in dsl 2.0. I can run my wireless fine in dsl 1.5 but have the same problem as listed above with dsl 2.0 and all the release candidates thereafter. I have 512 mb's RAM on an amd 64 3400 with a Broadcom 94306 internal wireless card using the bcmwl5.inf windows driver. You may want to see if you can run in dsl 1.5. Others that have posted in the forum seem to have similar trouble but can run the older dsl versions just fine. I just ordered a new usb wirelsess card with the prism chipset that should work with dsl so I can use the newest versions. I got tired of trying to make my current card work in dsl 2.0.

Posted by boehmerdaniel on Jan. 09 2006,11:09

Thanks for replying!

I may try DSL 1.5 when I am at home (at this time I am at school). But I actually don't like to use old versions of programs / OS's just because they handle something better. Does anybody know what the problem is? Can I expect a kind of patch?

I'll have to buy are card with a well supported chipset for my router. My plan is to use a very old machine as WLAN-Master which is not supported by Ndiswrapper (related to NDIS architecture). Please tell, whether your card runs fine or not.

Beside a new card or DSL 1.5 there is no possibility to stop this behavior, eh?

Daniel Böhmer

Posted by roberts on Jan. 09 2006,17:13

Help other users by compiling a native driver and contributing it to the community.

Posted by boehmerdaniel on Jan. 11 2006,21:19

This is a joke, isn't it? I am not an expert in Linux stuff and you are asking me to write a native driver for the card! You're kidding...

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 12 2006,17:39

No, he does not want you to write a driver.

He wants you to compile the existing driver source code and then donate the new driver files to the myDSL repository so that others won't have to repeat the extra effort of compiling the driver.