MEPIS Wireless

[kenjutsuka]

Hey guys, I have a laptop of mine where I decided to install *nix for the first time. This is a Tecra 8000 with a Linksys 54g PCMCIA card for wireless. I was told this model isn't terribly *nix friendly, but I don't have the money to go out and buy a new wireless card. The problem is I installed mepis locally on the HDD. Whenever I boot it says that the card was unabled to be initialized, and wlan0 cannot start. I've tried various setting in the OS configure and messed around with ndiswrapper just to see if I might be able to get it to start post boot. It's been kinda fruitless as of late, maybe you wise *nix guys would be able to help me? (Or maybe point out a distro or mod that would be beneficial? =) ) Thanks in advance for replies.

[John A]

I've tried various setting in the OS configure and messed around with ndiswrapper just to see if I might be able to get it to start post boot.

First of all, which distro or flavour of Unix are you using? If you're using Linux, make sure your kernel is 2.6.11.4 or later. If you're not using Linux, it will probably be a lot easier if you switch to Linux.

I found this article for using ndiswrapper to configure the WPC54G Linksys PCMCIA card on Linux:
http://www.t3i.nl/myblog/?p=31

Hope this helps

[kenjutsuka]

I am running MEPIS linux as stated in the subject, I am running kernel 2.6.11.25. MEPIS comes with ndiswrapper as a preinstall, I am having a problem with linux not loading my PCMCIA card, it's a boot problem.

[sn4rf3r]

jowprogrammer is right, you need to install the windows drivers and use ndiswrapper to use them.
ndiswrapper project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/

suppported drivers:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List#L

find your card and download the drivers

#mkdir /lib/windrivers
#cp <driver>.inf /lib/windrivers
#cp <driver>.sys /lib/windrivers

once you have ndiswrapper and the drivers installed in the directory created above you can run,

#ndiswrapper -i /lib/windrivers/<driver>.inf

to check if this worked run

#ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 present

now load kernel module

#modprobe ndiswrapper

## If everything went well you can run 
#dmesg
....
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

to autoload the module do this:

#echo "ndiswrapper" >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-<version>

I dotn know if mepis loads modules using modules.autoloan.d/kernel... this is for gentoo since thats what I run. MEPIS might be different in some syntax but for the most part it will be the same.

hope this helps =]