|-----------------------| | Linux Wireless setup | |-----------------------| Download ndiswrapper 1.2(or the latest stable release) from here: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ Here is a direct link to NdisWrapper 1.2 from sourceforge's mirror list: http://tinyurl.com/doqgt Go to the directory that you saved it under. tar -zxvf ndiswrapper-1.2.tar.gz cd ndiswrapper-1.2 make distclean make make install You have now extracted, compiled, and installed ndsiwrapper. Now for the hard part. You need to find the driver for your wireless device. Important: Do NOT use drivers on your CD. They may work, but you may experience kernel crashes etc.if the driver on your CD has not been tested. Here is a list of devices known to work with ndiswrapper and a link the the driver download: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List To identify the driver that you need, first identify the card you have with "lspci" and note the first column (such as 0000:00:0c.0) and then find out the PCI ID of the card that with "lspci -n" corresponding to the first column of "lspci" output. The PCI ID is third column (or fourth in some distributions) and of the form "104c:8400". Now you need to get the Windows driver for this chipset. In the list of drivers, find out an entry for the same PCI ID and download the driver corresponding to it. Unpack the Windows driver with unzip/cabextract/unshield tools and find out the INF file (i.e., file with .INF or .inf extension) and SYS file (i.e., file with .SYS or .sys extension). If there are multiple INF/SYS files, you may look in the List if there are any hints about which of them should be used. Make sure the INF file, SYS file and any BIN files (for example, TI drivers use BIN firmware files) are all in one directory. Now use ndiswrapper to install the driver: ndiswrapper -i filename.inf This copies all necessary files to /etc/ndiswrapper and creates the config files for your card. After installing you can run: ndiswrapper -l to see the status of your installed drivers. If you have installed the correct driver you should see something like this: ------------------------------------------- Installed ndis drivers blah12 driver present, hardware present ------------------------------------------- Where "present" means that you have a card that can be used with the driver installed. Then load the module: modprobe ndiswrapper Use iwconfig to configure wireless network interface. First, see if the interface is available, with iwconfig On some cards, you will have to bring up the wlan interface first: ifconfig wlan0 up This tool is not likely to be present on your system. It is part of the package 'wireless-tools'(http://tinyurl.com/ywoou), which you should install. This will print the wireless interface (e.g., wlan0). iwconfig lo........no wireless extensions. wlan0.....IEEE 802.11G ESSID:off/any ..........Mode: Frequency:2.437Ghz Access Point:00:00:00:00:00:00 ..........Bit Rate:54Mb/s Tx-Power:14 dBm ..........Rts thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B ..........Encryption key:off ..........Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-30 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm ..........Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 ..........Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:75 Missed beacon:0 First off if you only see the lo part then it failed, and you should go back and try again with a different driver. If wlan0 has a different number at the end or is eth0 etc... don't worry its not a problem.You will notice that the ESSID says "off/any" and the field in Mode is missing here, if they aren't missing for you don't worry it shouldn't matter. The first thing we need to do is set the mode. iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed Ok it won't show a response here but it should have set the wifi mode. I'm doing this before setting the essid because I want to be sure the mode is compatible with the routers mode. iwconfig wlan0 essid linksys Here I'm setting the ESSID to match a linksys router. Of course unless you are using a linksys router your ESSID will be different. Now as long as you typed the ESSID right (Meaning got the correct one) then we should be ready to move on to the next step. ifconfig lo........Link encap:Local Loopback ..........inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 ..........UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 ..........Rx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 ..........Tx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 ..........collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 ..........RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) Tx bytes:0 (0.0 b) wlan0.....Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr: CENSORED ..........BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 ..........Rx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 ..........Tx Packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 ..........collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 ..........RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) Tx bytes:0 (0.0 b) ..........Memory:a800000-a801fff As you can see here you have no IP yet, but before we go and set your IP we should first give your system the addresses to some DNS servers. Otherwise you won't be able use domains Like google.com etc... Goto the file /etc/resolv.conf If it doesn't look something like this. search linuxinit.net nameserver 24.177.176.35 Then it will have to be made to look like that. These IPs are DNS IPs. You should use the ones provided by your ISP. My ISPs DNSs are: 24.177.176.35 66.168.240.35 24.178.80.35 Those are the only DNS servers I can think of off the top of my head. There are many others that you can put in. Now we can move on to setting your IP, mask etc.. ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.95 broadcast 192.168.1.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 ifconfig wlan0 up This just ensures everything you just did is activated. route add default gw 192.168.1.1 Here I'm setting the default gateway, this is basically your internet connection through the router. In most cases the gateway IP will be lowest ip in the set, as it is in this case. But as I've stated many times before, check on your router to be sure. Now, if your gateway address is set correctly the you should be up and ready to go =). If you want to you can also set your wireless nick with: iwconfig wlan0 nick NICKNAME But it shouldn't be needed. Once everything works fine you can write the correct modprobe settings to load ndiswrapper automatically when wlan0 interface is used, by running ndiswrapper -m -------- Here is a simple bash script that you can run every time you reboot to bring back up your wireless: #/bin/bash modprobe ndiswrapper echo "NdisWrapper loaded..." ifconfig wlan0 up echo "Wireless is up..." iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed echo "Mode set..." iwconfig wlan0 essid (SSID) echo "SSID set..." ifconfig wlan0 (LAN IP) echo "IP set..." ifconfig wlan0 broadcast (BROADCAST) echo "Broadcast set..." ifconfig wlan0 netmask (SUBNET) echo "Netmask set..." route add default gw (GATEWAY) echo "Gateway added to route..." echo "All done!" echo "Wireless is UP!!!"