Mdk 10 vs ndiswrapper (Belkin wireless PCI card)

[arlen]

OK, I've been whacking at this for a while, now.

 

The card is the infamous F5D7000, run the Broadcom 94306 chipset. Due to DoD restrictions, there's no OS driver for the card, which means I have to resort to ndiswrapper, and there's where the problems multiply beyond reason.

 

So I pick up the current tarball (0.8) from sourceforge and start in. First, the code seems to compile properly. (At least, no error messages.) So far, so good.

 

Step two, "/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i /mnt/cdrom/Driver/bcmw5l.inf", after su-ing, of course. Message says "Installing bcmwl5".

 

Step three, "/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l" to check on it. Ooops. Message: "Can't use string ("") as an ARRAY ref while "strict refs" in use at /usr/sbin.ndiswrapper line 324, <LS2> line 1."

 

OK, so I pull out emacs see that ndiswrapper is reading the inf file at that point. I decide, just for grins and giggles, to pop into ndiswrapper and comment out "use strict". OK, "ndiswrapper -l" now prints a list of the installed drivers, but I don't feel too solid, because I just opened the door to a ton of other problems, I know. But if everything else works, I can always go back and do some cleanup and bug-swatting later.

 

But the real problem is on step four, loading the module. "modprobe ndiswrapper" and hey, presto! I'm dead. No activity, nothing. 24 karat lockup.

 

I've gone back to square one twice, and even tried using the ndsiwrapper 0.4 that came on the mdk images and the short how-to that Beesea posted on this board (after all, lspcidrake shows it shares the sames hex codes with beesea's card). No joy.

 

Has anyone out there managed to get this board (F5D7000) working? (Since CompUSA is now flogging them for $10 each, I'd suspect there will be a boatload in use shortly, so we'd better get something solid worked out, soon.)

 

The box this is in (one of the Shuttle boxen) is a dual-boot with Win2K, and the Win side works flawlessly and fast with the card. It's a bit galling to not be able to bring up the Linux side of it inside of a week, after the Win install took just a few seconds.

[arlen]

Further note: located a real lspci, and went back to square one (again). Now everything works fine up to the "modprobe ndiswrapper" step, then the lockup occurs.

[arlen]

Murphy's law.

 

After I posted I picked up another set of drivers for the Broadcom chipset that's in the Belkin card from:

 

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp23001-23500/SP23067.exe

 

Then I uninstalled the Belkin drivers and installed the newly acquired ones, and all works.

 

The Compaq download is a self-extracting installer, so you'll need to d/l them, get them to a Winbox and run it. Tell it to extract the files to a known location, then quit the installer and get the files over to your Linux box.

 

The other thing I did was to install the pciutils rpm, to get the real lspci, and not lspcidrake.

 

Then simply follow the instructions in the ndiswrapper installer doc, and it works.

[Guest pgsirois]

In the interest of helping others struggling with this, I too abandoned "official" drivers for my Linksys WMP54g v2, and used the HP/Compaq driver found at ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp23001-23500/SP23107.exe (note different .exe file name than the one Arlen used, though inside may be same BCM94306 driver version).

 

Also note: from SP23107.exe, I used bcmwl5a.inf and NOT bcmwl5.inf. Actual BCM94306 driver version is "DriverVer=10/28/2003, 3.40.25.3"

 

I then followed INSTALL instructions for ndiswrapper-0.8, and voila, am now network-enabled through my wmp54g.

 

Finally: I had to configure my internet connection via iwconfig and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts...."Internet Access" under Mdklinux Control Center 10 doesn't seem to work.