Wednesday, 9 March 2011

Installing Ndiswrapper in Linux for wireless surfing

Ndiswrapper is a software tool where it will start up the network card in your machine due to the reason that most wireless card manufacturers do not program a software for linux.
Why? It is because not many people are using Linux. Why bother to create a software for such a small market.
Fortunately all are not lost. Experts have gather together and produce some of the wonderful software to work with linux. ndiswrapper is one of them,. Lets start to set it up.

Setting up the wireless network card in linux.
Type lspci to retrieve the hardware numer (On the extreme left column)
Type lspci -n to list out the number of the card(Listed on the right)

Use the number and go to http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net to view & download the driver file using the name of the hardware. For mine, i'm using
'Dell wireless 1390 WLAN mini card', number: 14e4:4311 (Some cards drivers can be found in mad wifi webpage if the driver for other network card is
not available at ndiswrapper)

Download the exe file

Start to install by create a new directory to hold the new downloaded exe file, /home/<name_of_directory>
Go into the directory
Type this command to unzip the exe file
# unzip -a R115321.exe
or use this command to unzip the exe file
# cabextract xxxx.exe

If ndiswrapper is install previously, use this command to remove ndiswrapper in the system:
# sudo make
# sudo uninstall
# rmmod ndiswrapper


Go into the driver folder after unziping the contents and type this command:
# sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
# sudo ndiswrapper -l (this is to check if the ndiswrapper is installed)
# ndiswrapper -m (there should be an output 'Adding "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper)
# depmod -a
# modprobe ndiswrapper
# ndiswrapper -v (to see the version of ndiswrapper)

Sometimes after installing, ndiswrapper does not seems to be working for the first time in other flavours, my case in slackware. I will
type these commands to bring up the wireless network, wlan0

# ifconfig wlan0 up
# dhclient


Some linux flavours use the default bcm43xx to install the wireless card, I need to blacklist this file as it will conflict with the
ndiswrapper.

# echo blacklist bcm43xx >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules (after modprobe)

The steps below is to scan for wireless networks in linux.
# iwlist wlan0 scan ( to scan for wireless)
# iwconfig (to see if wlan0 is register)
# ndiswrapper -m (to list a line of code in the module)

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