Re: NdisWrapper for Wireless HowTo

Although I can appreciate the opinion of Veronica Mars ;), and of the latest
Linux distro flavor of the month, Wireless on Linux is hardly easy. It's a
hornet's nest out there.

I have a Fujitsu N3010 with a Broadcom BCM4306 which works perfectly on the
dark side. I have a few requirements on how wifi should work for my network.
First, my wifi router is already setup with WPA PSK encryption and it needs
to work the same on Linix or I have to change it every time I want to login.
Second, my host does not broadcast it's SSID and I don't want to change that
either.

I struggled with setting up wifi on it with Suse 9.2 for a month and gave
up. I even tried the Linuxant Driverloader and could not get it to work. I
finally wiped Suse off the disk and went with someting I am familiar with
that has supposedly worked for other in this combination, Madr[ake]iva, and
their latest incarnation 2005 LE. I have used Mandrake for years and I am
very familiar with it (use what you know when there's a problem). I went
through the same steps as I did with Suse and it would not work with any of
the three drivers I had. Then, digging through the ndiswrapper wiki, I found
reference to a Dell driver for this chipset. I downloaded it, installed it,
loaded the module, and Bingo, everything worked. Go figure.

I also have a PMCCIA Airlink AWLC4030 and have not gotten close to getting
it to work yet (with any reasonable encryption) at full speed.

The moral is, it is not easy to setup wifi on Linux. Your chipset,
distribution, driver loading method, encryption level, speed, and security
configuration all combine to make it much more complex than it should be.

On 4/24/05, Derek Neighbors <derek@gnue.org> wrote:
>
> I have a Dell Latitude D505 with a broadcom. I installed Ubuntu and
> virtually everything was recognized out of the box except for the
> wireless card. I followed the how-to they provide (took about 5
> minutes) and viola working wireless.
>
> If you are running a desktop or mobile computer I strongly suggest
> Ubuntu. Plus, Veronica Mars mentioned Ubuntu on national television as
> being better than OS X. Which means it must be cool. ;)
>
> NDIS Ubuntu FAQ
> http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SetupNdiswrapperHowto/
>
> -D
>
> Eric "Shubes" wrote:
>
> > The pdf and tex forms of the document can be found at
> > http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0405&L=asulug&P=R10679&I=-3




--
Donn
"Sarcasm is the safe alternative to expressing anger."
--Richard North Patterson