ndiswrapper help please?

[essenby]

Hi,

I am somewhat of a noobie with Linux and I'm checking my hardware compatability by using the LiveCD of Kubuntu 6.06 and I've run into a problem with the network card.  It's a Dell Latitude 610 laptop with a Dell 1470 wireless card which has a Broadcom 4319 chipset.  The card is recognised, and modprobe shows that the bcm43xx module is loaded, but I cannot "see" any wireless networks.  Obviously as I cannot see them I cannot configure to connect to anything.

I suspect it's a firmware issue as I had a similar problem with PCLinuxOS when using the bcm43xx module. However, I did mnage to get a fully fuctional connection using ndiswraaper and the latest drivers downloaded from Dell. My qusetion is, how do I use ndiswrapper under Kubuntu.  Even when I change to su it reports "command not found".  Is ndiswrapper omitted from the LiveCD for some reason or am I missing some subtle PATH trick somewhere? 

[a_l_a_n]

Re: ndiswrapper help please?

Download and build from source here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/

Once installed I think the commands will be

$ ndiswrapper -i <yourdriver>.inf
$ modprobe ndiswrapper

(make sure you are in the directory containing the .inf file and whatever else came with it as ndis can use those other files too I think).

(you might need to add an "$ depmod -a" in there).

You may then need to restart your networking.

$ /etc/init.d/networking restart

after ensuring you have a suitable set of lines in your /etc/network/interfaces.

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp

should be enough I think.

You can add ndiswrapper to /etc/modules to have it loaded at the start I think.