Wireless in NLD

Last year I took my elderly laptop to Brainshare. I reformatted to Linux since I knew I could make it hardened enough to withstand the hordes of packet-scanners out there. It was Slackware, since Novell Linux Desktop wasn't quite out yet, and my linux skills were still firmly rooted in Slackware. I had a hard time getting my network card to even run in it, due to the problems Linux has with drivers in general. The only blog reference to that time was this entry.

I ended up borrowing an Orinoco card from another admin here, and it worked like a charm. It wasn't pretty, but it was solid.

Today, I managed to get NLD installed onto this laptop and also managed to kludge ndiswrapper into running the driver for my card! Yay! But it took a bit of hacking to get it working, since I don't have a Red Carpet subscription.

In short:
  1. Download latest ndiswrapper from sourceforge
  2. Install kernel-sources from source media
  3. Install compiler from source media
  4. Install gnu-make from source media
  5. Expand ndiswrapper somewhere (I used /usr/src/)
  6. From the ndiswrapper directory do "make install"
  7. Go to /lib/modules/2.6.5-7.244-default
  8. cd into 'extra'
  9. move the "ndiswrapper.ko" some where else
  10. ln -s ../misc/ndiswrapper.ko
    1. This is because the 'make install' puts the module in a different place than YaST does, and the kernel finds the YaST module first. Then pukes.
  11. modprobe ndiswrapper
  12. Joy! no errors!
  13. Locate the windows drivers for your card. You'll need the .inf and .sys files.
  14. "modprobe -i <.inf file>"
  15. "modprobe -l" to verify your driver loaded
  16. Insert your Wireless card
  17. Hope.
From there, you're on your own. Nor am I guaranteeing that this'll work every time. This worked on my NetGear wg511v2 card that I had such trouble with last year. Now to see if it is actually STABLE.

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