WPC54G Wireless Card

[anndruu12]

Ok, to start out I am a complete Linux noob. This is my third day on Linux and I am still working on getting things straight. I am now trying to get my wireless working and from what I read I am in for a hellish ride. I have a Dell Inspiron 1100 Laptop with a Linksys WPC54G Wireless Card.

I can connect to the internet find through a wired connection but it doesn't recognize anything that has to do with wireless. I assume it doesn't recognize my card, and I can't see any AP's to try to connect to. I have been reading through tutorials but I keep getting stuck on them because I can't seem to get ndiswrapper installed. I have run commands like sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 and it will go through and say it is installing and that is is installed. Then when I type in ndiswrapper it tells me that it is not installed. If I can get some help getting ndiswrapper installed then maybe I can get further to explain more problems that I am having. Thanks.

[valemon]

Try downloading ndsiwrapper tarball from here.
Extract it with tar -zxvf ndiswrapper.versionwhatever. Then cd to the file created and type ./configure, make and make install as root. This should get ndiswrapper installed so you can go installing the drivers. post if any errors

[Giles]

You may not need to use ndiswrapper. If it's working for you, great , but I've had mixed experiences with it, so I tend to look for native Linux drivers for the cards. It will depend partly on which version of the card you've got: versions 1 and 3 apparently use broadcom chipsets (for which I don't know of a linux driver), but version 2 uses texas instruments TI ACX 111, and there is a project for a linux driver for this chipset. So if you can't make progress with ndiswrapper, and you have a version two card, you'll have another way forward.

(If you don't know what version your card is, type

lspci

in a command line window, and look for a line about your wireless card).

Toodle-oo
Giles