lhm

Hello everyone.

I hope there is someone who can help me deal with this as I am getting VERY, VERY frustrated here...

What I need to do is to get my IBM 390X laptop work with Belkin F5D7050 USB wireless network adapter with WPA-PSK (TKIP). I understand, I have to use Ndiswrapper to get the drivers work and then wpa_supplicant to make WPA work. To make it easier, I changed my encryption to WEP for time being in order to be able to see wheather the Ndis-wrapped driver works in the first place before starting to play with wpa_supplicant.

My machine has Debian Etch (testing 2.6.18-3-686) installed on it which was installed using Cisco Aironet 350 NIC. That one connects to internet no trouble at all. Plugged in the Belkin adapter and ran the following commands as instructed here:

1. apt-get install module-assistant
2. module-assistant prepare
3. apt-get install ndiswrapper-source
4. module-assistant build ndiswrapper
5. apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
6. module-assistant install ndiswrapper
7. ndiswrapper -i /file/path/filename.inf
8. depmod -a
9. modprobe ndiswrapper

All that ran no problem at all. Then I ran ndiswrapper -l which returned:

rt2500usb invalid driver!

To correct that one (as I found instructed somewhere on the web), I copied rt2500usb.sys to /etc/ndiswrapper/rt2500usb. Running ndiswrapper -l after that returned:

rt2500usb driver present, hardware (050D:7050) present

BUT. ifconfig wlan0 up returns:

wlan0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

The output of my ifconfig is as follows:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr [Cisco aironet MAC address here]

inet6 addr: fe80::20d::28ff::fef4::be9a/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST and so on...

lo Link enca;:Local Loopback

inet addre:127.0.0.1 Mask 255.0.0.0 and so on...

And the output of my iwconfig is this:

sit0 no wireless extensions

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"My essid"

Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442 GHz Access Point: [router's mac address here]
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s and so on...

wifi0 all the same as for eth0 goes here

I wondered if that sit0 actually was my USB adapter but after doing ifconfig sit0 up and ifconfig what I got for sit0 was:

sit0 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4

inet6 addr: ::127.0.0.1/96 Scope:Unknown
UP RUNNING NOARP MTU:1480 Metric:1
Rx packets, Tx packets and so on

Can someone explain what's going on, I have been struggling with this for so long now... please.

Dapper Dan

Don't know if this would matter, but I think you run ndiswrapper -l right after ndiswrapper -i to ensure the driver is properly installed and hardware is present. I've never run it after depmod -a and modprobe. Possibly it could give a different reading depending on when you do it? It seems if you ran modprobe ndiswrapper without complaints, the driver should be installed. I have the same chipset in a Dlink and with ndiswrapper it uses from the included CD netrtusb. I had major problems with it locking my system. As I did, you could try the native rt2570 driver from serialmonkey. I'm using that right now and so far I'm getting good results. I couldn't advise on the business about the .sys file, but maybe thats why it won't see it as a device. I've also found different versions of Ndiswrapper give widely varying results. I'd try a different version of ndiswrapper just to see, and install the .inf file. Also, is the driver you are installing from XP? Have you tried the others? Win2k etc? You've probably considered all of these things. I'd give the rt2570 a try though. Sorry I couldn't help more...

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lhm

You are right there, I did run depmod -a and modprobe ndiswrapperbefore ndiswrapper -l but that should be the right thing to do. I will try the rt2570 driver from serialmonkey, as you suggested. With the version of ndiswrapper, I think it downloads the most recent one automatically well, I hope so, because I don't want to have all this business of uninstalling it again, easier just to re-do the whole OS for me. Yes, the driver I was trying to install is from the CD that came with it. But I installed it with Sarge in the past and it worked like a dream. May be Etch would like the serialmonkey driver better? But I'll give rt2570 a try and post the results tonight. thank you for the advice, LHM