Gigafast WF748-CUI wireless USB adapter

Forum: Networking
Topic: Gigafast WF748-CUI wireless USB adapter
started by: agmothic

Posted by agmothic on April 26 2006,05:53

Hello,
Has anyone here successfully installed a Gigafast WF748-CUI wireless USB adapter on DSL 2.3? I picked one up on sale, it works just fine with WinXP, and now would like to get it working on an old machine with a DSL 2.3 frugal install using USB 1.1.

I've tried everything that I know of:
-Wlanconfig (No wireless network card found)
-Ndiswrapper (connection failed, ndiswrapper -l says zd1211u hardware not present)
-attempted to "make" the contents of the tar.gz file that came in the linux section of the installation CD (after installing gcc successfully, altering the "Makefile" for the 2.4 kernel, I still ended up with numerous errors when attempting to "make" it)

DSL is rapidly turning into my favorite distro and this one last thing is driving me nuts. Please speak slow as my Linux and programming skills are laughable.

Thank you
agmothic@yahoo.ca

Posted by roberts on April 26 2006,15:49

1. I would suggest you try dsl v2.4RC2 which has a very upgraded ndiswrapper. It is in the release candidate area.

2. Or try the 2.6 kernel version, which is DSL-N

Posted by agmothic on April 30 2006,23:41

I tried the newer versions, no luck. Ndiswrapper -l shows:
Installed drivers:
zd1211u driver installed, hardware present

However nothing I know of trying actually gets it to function as a wireless device. I am almost ready to give up, do you have any idea where to go from here?

Thanks in advance.

Posted by roberts on May 01 2006,00:03

Hopefully I am insulting you by posting the other steps needed but not shown in your post.

I would start by ending any pump command that may be hanging trying to obtain an ip by

# pkill pump

If ndiswrapper -l shows device present that is good.
next steps needed:

# modprobe ndiswrapper

This should 'create' the device

# iwconfig

This hopeully will show an unconfigured device, use this to get name, likely wlan0

# iwlist wlan0 scan

If this works then the card will see nearby access points.

# iwconfig wlan0 essid your_netowrk_name
# iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
# iwconfig wlan0 key your_key_here_if_used

-or- iwconfig needed for your particular setup

If you use dhcp to obtain an ip then
# pump -i wlan0

# ifconfig
This hopefully will show a wlan0 with an ip.

Some users report that they need to reboot between unsucessful attempts. I find I usualy only need to kill the hanging pump.

HTH

Posted by agmothic on May 02 2006,04:37

>Hopefully I am insulting you by posting the other steps needed but not shown in your post.

Not to worry at all, spoon feed me as much as possible. I really do not have a good grasp of this, although I'm learning far more than I ever wanted to.

Unfortunately I still do not have this working. I've "pkilled", ndiswrapper -l still says the hardware is present. I can modprobe with no errors. However when I "iwconfig" no wlan0 shows up and "iwlist wlan0 scan" results in:

wlan0 Interface doesn't support scanning : No such device

At this point I've been on the web and tried out so many commands I've forgotten them. However the long and the short of it is that DSL recognizes the adapter on the USB plug (lsusb), can ndiswrapper the driver but can not make that final leap and make a wlan0 device from it.

I've tried downloading from Zydas a current version of the Windows ZD1211 drivers. The Ndiswrapper version in the DSL 2.4RC2 which I'm running supposedly supports this Zydas chipset. I really don't know what else to try at this point. It just seems to refuse to work.

Any more ideas? I'm stumped.