HELP!!! I'm drowning in Noob sauce

[Racerx78]

I am new to linux trying to find my way around. I'm a computer engineer, but all my experience has been in windows. I'm trying to convert to linux but totally lost.

I downloaded and installed Suse 10.2, and setup a dual boot setup with Grub. I haven't got much further because i can't my my WNIC to work. I need help in getting it running. I have a Netgear WG311v3 with the Marvell chipset. I searched some forums and downloaded ndiswrapper, but i don't know where to go from there..... So Please Help.

[Dapper Dan]

Hi Racerx78 and welcome to the forums!

First: Know your Google! I found this in about 30 seconds...

Link

*buntu is Debian based so this How to should work for you. Wireless can be very frustrating in Linux because so few wireless manufacturers make drivers for us. So we have to use our own that the Linux community comes up with. It might be a good idea for you to read through the linked article in my signature. It will likely help seeing as how you are coming from a solid Windows background. Heck, I'm just a good ol' boy redneck from South Carolina. If I can figure Linux out, you should have no trouble! Good Luck!

Edit: By the way, it says in that article to do everything as root. In Ubuntu you don't use root but rather 'sudo.' So you'll need to preceed your commands with sudo as in:

sudo apt-get install module-assistant

...and so on.

[Racerx78]

This is where my noob-ness kicks in. If found that wiki, but didn't know what to do with it. When it referred to "Wrap the driver" or Install the driver i didn't know where to enter these commands. Do i use the console or something else. I also downloaded NDISWRAPPER but i'm not sure if i installed it or not, or how to use it. So this is where i need help.

[Dapper Dan]

LOL... I don't know where I got the idea that you were using Ubuntu... I guess it was just very late and I was very sleepy, so disregard all that about sudo.

To get ndiswrapper on SuSE, (and... please understand I haven't used SuSE in a long time...) I found this pretty straight ahead tutorial. If you run into trouble, let us know. Once ndiswrapper is installed, we'll figure out how to get your driver compiled.

You said you weren't sure if ndiswrapper was already installed on your system. Open a terminal... Konsole will do and it is in your menu... type:

ndisw

and press the Tab key a couple of times. This is the "autocompletion" key in Linux and makes Linux far easier than it would be otherwise. If autocompletion finishes out... "ndiswrapper" or gives you that along with maybe some other choices... then it is installed. If not, then it is not installed and you should begin the tutorial...