ndiswrapper worked, but my card isnt there...

Forum: Networking
Topic: ndiswrapper worked, but my card isnt there...
started by: tehjones

Posted by tehjones on Mar. 22 2007,04:37

ok, first off, my problem involves my broadcom 4311 and DSL-N, booting from a 256mb flash drive.

i finaly got ndiswrapper to load my driver (turns out i had a bad copy), but my wireless still wont work.;

after i install bcmwl5.inf i run this:

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ndiswrapper -l

and it shows that driver and hardware are installed.

then i do

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sudo ndiswrapper -m

and it say something about allies wlan0. normal so far (i think...)

then i try

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sudo iwconfig wlan0and

it tells me that there is no such device.

then just to see what happens, i tried the next step:

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sude iwconfig wlan0 "my ssid" key "my wep"

and it said that if failed at wireless device and that is doesnt exist.

i thought everything was working up to this point, but then my card wont show up. am i missing a step?

like i said, this is all in damn small linux-not. and it is being loaded from a 256mb flash drive. i have been running it this way ever since i screwed up my first ubuntu install (dual booting with xp) and grub spazed out so bad that i had to wipe myentire hard drive (im sure there were other options, but i wanted to start clean.).

my thinking is that if i screw this up, i can wipe it and start over agian (and again, and again....) with little or no impact on the rest of my system. at least that the thought. could this problem be cuased by booting from the flash drive. i know that doing it this way is sub-optimum, as it hold everything in a single FAT partition. but that wouldnt effect this, would it?

AAARG !!

thanks in advance guys,
jones

Posted by Wittfella on Mar. 22 2007,10:12

You have to issue 'modprobe ndiswrapper' aswell, before the iwconfig commands.

Posted by tehjones on Mar. 23 2007,02:06

ok, i tried that. same story.

it still says that my card doesnt exist. should i try a different driver maybe?

Posted by Wittfella on Mar. 23 2007,02:37

After you 'modprobe ndiswrapper' check 'dmesg' to see if it loaded properly, it should show some info about the card.

About the driver, when you check 'ndiswrapper -l' it should say:

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Installed drivers:
bcmwl5 driver installed, hardware present

As long as it says 'hardware present' the driver should be good.

Posted by tehjones on Mar. 23 2007,03:44

ndiswrapper -l does tell me that my card and drivers are good, but when i try to do the iwconfig, it says "driver installed, hardware present".

and just so you dont think im a totaly tard, i can get a wireless card to work, just not my internal one.

i have a linksys usb wireless adapter that i had just sitting around, so i threw that in there and it works fine. i just dont want to have a usb network card hanging off the side of my laptop all the time.

Posted by rothmail on Mar. 27 2007,16:59

Quote (tehjones @ Mar. 22 2007,22:44)

Is it showing up as a device in ifconfig? lspci? lsusb?

Posted by quetzalgreen on April 04 2007,23:05

Hi ! I've noticed that ndiswrapper doesnt quite work the same way under
DSL as in KNOPPIX. In Knoppix the -i and then -m was sufficient to get
the driver loaded and the device available for ifconfig/iwconfig but under
DSL I issue only -i to install the driver (same as yours since I have a linksys
cardbus adapter too) and issue 'update-modules', once or possibly several times. I also issue ndiswrapper -l in the hopes that it will kick the driver in. Eventually the device shows up on the list accompanied by the kernel messages. I suspect that you probably can get by with just issuing the update-modules and then wait a few minutes (yes minutes) and it will become available. Odd, I know but that's how I've seen it. The delay is possibly related to some synchronising it's doing with the access point. Dunno for sure. Never used dhcp for wireless so I'm not sure how that will work from that point on. Probably would though.
/ Peter