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Can you recommend a wireless card?


erniev
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I bought a copy of Powerpack 2010 but have failed to get wireless connectivity.

 

The card I am currently using is a Belkin Wirless G Desktop Network card - and I have now given up trying to get it working.

 

Can anyone suggest a wireless card that they know to work with Powerpack 2010?

 

Thank you,

erniev

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Well I have used a Belkin Wireless G Notebook Card (F5D7010) with ndiswrapper and the Windows XP driver successfully for quite a while now with Mandriva 2010.

I use wpa2 encryption which is a piece of cake to set up.

Have you tried using ndiswrapper?

Edited by SilverSurfer60
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Yes I have tried using ndiswrapper and pointing it to the location of the xp drivers but get various messages:

 

Unable to find the ndiswrapper interface...

 

Unable to find network interface for selected device (using (ndiswrapper)

 

The card I have is F5D7001 uk -

 

I welcome any further suggestion

 

Thank you

ev

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As part of a fault finding process I would check the driver for the card was in fact loaded for ndiswrapper.

If you haven't already done so issue the following commands in a konsole.

ndiswrapper -l

note that is a lowercase L.

This will give you a list of drivers installed and will tell you if the hardware is present.

If you get an error or no drivers listed then the driver needs to be installed. I usually do this manually in a konsole. If you are not sure about this please let us know.

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Thank you - the result from ndiswrapper - l :

 

bcmlw5 driver installed

device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver ssb)

bcmlw5a driver installed

device (14E4:4320) present (alternate driver ssb)

 

I'm reading this as the driver and the device are identified ...but for some reason I cannot get them working together to give me internet access.

 

Is there anything else I can do?

 

thank you

ev

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From your list of drivers I see there are two for the same card one with an 'a' as appendix. This maybe confusing ndiswrapper. I would suggest removing both of those drivers with

ndiswrapper -e [followed by the driver name as listed

in a konsole. Do this for both drivers. The reinstall one at a time. If one does not work uninstall it before installing the next one. The install command is

ndiswrapper -i [followed by the full path of the .inf file]

It is possible you may need to try a Windows98 Driver instead of XP.

There is a wiki page that lists all known drivers required for given wireless chips. You would need to find out what chip the card uses and do a google search and then search the database on the wiki for you chip.

Also to help there is a man page for ndiswrapper that lists all the command options.

I hope this makes sense to you.

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I hope this makes sense to you.

 

SiverSurfer Yes - it does make sense thank you - however still some difficulty

 

I tried a number of path options to the inf file for the ndiswrapper -e but always got the message "No such file or directory exists"

 

however when I tried it with ndiswrapper -i with the same path ( /home/ev/WiFi/bcmwl5a.inf) I get the message already installed.

 

So it reconises the path (I am assuming) for the install command but not for the -e command.

 

However I am sure there is something I am not doing -

 

Thankyou

ev

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You haven't told us anything about your system so this is a shot in the dark.

 

Architecture mismatch?

If you installed 64bit Mandriva and are using 32bit Windows drivers it won't work and will give you the errors you describe.

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I'm sure I installed 32 bit Mandriva - is there a way I can confirm this?

I'm not sure but if when you do Ctrl+Alt+F1 you see "for x86_64" at the end of the top line it's probably 64bit and if you see "for i586" it's probably 32bit.

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When trying to get PCMCIA or USB plug-in devices to work with Linux I usually begin by looking at the dmesg lines generated when the device is connected. Sometimes dmesg will log a request for a firmware file, I then find the firmware, place it in the correct place, and the device will then work with native Linux drivers. The dmesg lines can also provide terms you can use in google to find reports of how others have fixed the issue.

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Sorry you are having so much trouble erniev. I may have misled you a little with the instructions. The

ndiswrapper -e

does not require a path to the filename. Just supply the name as given in the list by ndiswrapper and ndiswrapper will delete it.

By the path that you have given in your last post I take it you have copied the *.inf & *.sys files to your computer. Do you have access to Windows 98 and other Windows drivers? Sometimes a different flavour of Windows driver will work. It's a bit of messing about but there is no way of telling you which driver to use. There is a website devoted to ndiswrapper, or there used to be, maybe you could find the information on there. I have installed a few wireless cards in the past and not had this much trouble.

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I'm not sure but if when you do Ctrl+Alt+F1 you see "for x86_64" at the end of the top line it's probably 64bit and if you see "for i586" it's probably 32bit.

Thank you K Bergen, I carried out as suggested get i586 in the top line. I thought so but it is good to confirm this.

 

Thanking you

ev

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Silver Surfer I thank you for your continued support - I am really puzzled (not that it takes much)as I did have this system running successfully with the wireless card on a earlier version of Mandriva (2007 I think it was).

 

I visited the Belkin site and the driver download appears be a one size fits all for XP and Win 98.

 

I have found a ArchWiki page on Broadcom 4312 - 43xx cards.

 

when i enter the command lspci| grep BCM43 I get confirmation that the network controller is BCM4306 - which does not appear to be covered by this wiki page but suggests a web site where I may find the b43 driver....my next stop.

 

If you don't mind I may come back to you for assistance..

 

Regards to you

erniev

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  • 2 weeks later...

I use Netgear WG311 V3 PCI Wireless cards on 64 Bits and 32 Bits with the ndiswrapper.

 

So far works wonders. It uses the Atheros Chipset.

 

One thing that I noticed is, when some updates comes in or a Kernel Update, you have to "load" the driver.

It goes through the Wizard but "remembers" where the driver is, just click apply and off you go.

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