Gave up too soon...
setting up WiFi in Mandriva 2008.0 is fairly painless.
1) Identify your wireless adapter.
2) Download the driver installer application from your laptop or wireless adaptor vendors.
3) Open up a terminal and switch to su by typing:
and enter your root password when prompted.
4) type
to see if you have ndiswrapper installed, and to see if you have any drivers already installed.
4a) If you don't have ndiswrapper installed, then place your DVD in the optical drive and click "Configure Your Computer." (The blue computer screen icon with the red box wrench in a circle in the lower left hand corner of your screen.
4b) Enter your root password and click "Manage Software" and type "ndiswrapper" in the search box.
4c) place a check next to "ndiswrapper" with "NdisWrapper binary loader utility" under it. My computer shows version "1.47-2mdv2008.0". Click "Apply" and once its finished, click "Quit".
5) Once you know that you have ndiswrapper installed, you can unzip your windows wireless driver from the application installer by going back into the terminal window and typing
Code:
sudo -s
echo blacklist bcm43xx >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
exit
I know you're already super user, but I did it this way because I was loosely following some steps in the
Ubuntu Forums.
5a) Restart your computer.
if you're still in the terminal window.
6) After restarting, go call up another terminal window and change to the directory that you downloaded the installer appplication to. Mine was called "r151517.exe" and it was on the Desktop. (I recommend moving the executable to another folder before unzipping it.)
6a) Type the following, substituting your actual application name for "r151517.exe" and your correct driver for "bcmwl5.inf"
Code:
unzip -a r151517.exe
cd ./DRIVER
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l
7) If you chose the right driver, you should get a message stating that both the driver and the firmware were found.
Code:
ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo -s
echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules
exit
sudo iwlist scanning
After a few seconds, you should see the wireless access points that your computer found. I hope that this helps someone else in the future.
Will
I righting clicked on the wire thingy on the lower right hand part of the screen. and clicked confgure network, then wireless then the first option witch is my wireless card (theros AR5413). it said it was unable to find a network interface for device.? I whent back and clicked use windows driver. it took me a while to figure out that i needed to install ndiswrapper for it to work.(or maby you don't
Linear Mode
