How to install ndiswrapper for the IBM 11a/b/g WLAN adaptor

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Revision as of 15:00, 12 November 2005 by 84.169.132.167 (Talk) (Enable wireless status led)
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Usage of the IBM 11 a/b/g adapter with ndiswrapper:

Because I had massive problems getting the madwifi driver running on kernel 2.6.13 I gave ndiswrapper a try - with impressive success:

Reference system

Configuration of Ndiswrapper

Enable wireless status led

I once had the problem that the wireless led status doesn't come up with loading the driver. After a while I figured out that the driver could be configured through a config file that is located in /etc/ndiswrapper/net5211. When you load ndiswrapper it tells you through messages which config file it uses.

wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX using driver net5211, configuration file XXX:XXX.X.conf

Changing 'gpioPinFunc1|1' to 'gpioPinFunc1|0' in the configuration file should enable the wireless status led.

Advantages of Ndiswrapper

  • full power management support (madwifi has no powermanagement support)
  • connection to access points establishes fast (madwifi has problems here / especially with dhcp)

There are also some drawbacks of Ndiswrapper against madwifi. Some features that madwifi allready provides are missing in ndiswrapper.

Installation instructions

Note: You can also install the driver from an existing windows system. Mount your windows partition and locate the *.INF file of the windows driver: find -name NET5211.INF