Dappan Koothu

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I got Ubuntu runnin on my lappie in early december and had configured wireless using NdisWrapper to load the. Owing to a lot of curiosity and requests I am postin this here.

• Identify the wireless chipset on your laptop, mine is BCM4318 from Broadcom Corporation.
• Try to locate your wireless card here and download the driver if found on the list
• Now go ahead and download NdisWrapper from here and then install it.(It has a readme file and installing shouldn’t be a problem)
• Now run the command ndiswrapper -i filename.inf from the terminal. Since I was using Ubuntu I had to use sudo to get administrative priveleges. The .inf file is the windows driver that you downloaded from the wiki page. Eg sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
• This copies all necessary files to /etc/ndiswrapper and creates the config files for your card.
• After installing you can run ndiswrapper -l to see the status of your installed drivers
• If you have installed the correct driver you should see something like this:
  Installed ndis drivers:
  bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present
• Then we load the ndiswrapper module with:modprobe ndiswrapper and sudo modprobe ndiswrapper if Ubuntu.
• you can have a look if the kernel sees the wlan nic:dmesg | tail -n 6

  which gives you a description of your wireless lan interface:

  [20457.536492] ndiswrapper version 1.1 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
  [20457.541643] ndiswrapper: driver bcmwl5 (Broadcom,02/11/2005, 3.100.64.0) loaded
  [20457.541803] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:06:05.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
  [20457.546419] ndiswrapper: using irq 21
  [20457.800500] wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:0e:9b:c0:d3:cb using driver bcmwl5, configuration file 14E4:4318.5.conf
  [20457.800522] wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP, WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP

• Now we configure the interface with:iwconfig

  which shows wether that the interface is available

• Now we can scan the wlan access point:iwlist wlan0 scan

  and use the following command to get network access:

  ifconfig wlan0 up and sudo ifconfig wlan0 up if Ubuntu
  dhclient wlan0 and sudo dhclient wlan0 if Ubuntu

• Acer users running FC4 can find help here
• This should probably help to get wi-fi access on most lappies and wireless cards. Just make sure that your kernel supports NdisWrapper

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