Tearing My Hair Out (ha ha)

Right, the last post details how to get the adapter working assuming you have a working ndiswrapper.

My girlfriend bought herself a new laptop a couple of weeks ago, thereby freeing up my very old Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop which I hadn't managed to touch since she moved in. Since I'm not actually running a Linux desktop at the moment I thought this would be ideal to try stuff out on. Unfortunately Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) wasn't having any of it and the installer kept freezing with a corrupted display. The Ubuntu Alternate CD was an option but I found a couple of references to fluxbuntu, an Ubuntu based distro using the fluxbox window manager. I'd used fluxbox before so thought it was worth a try. The installation failed once when the laptop switch itself off (almost as if it timed out and powersave kicked in) but worked perfectly on a second attempt if I pressed the spacebar every now and again. (Who knows?)

Once installed the first thing is to get on-line and get any patches and whatnot. While there are some new drivers (madwifi) around since I last tried this, they don't support the Broadcom chipset in my Netgear wg121 USB wireless adapter.

So the accepted solution is to use ndiswrapper, a Linux implementation of Windows' Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) APIs. This will load Windows drivers for your wireless adapter and allow Linux to use them. The ndiswrapper project consists of two parts,

1. The ndiswrapper module. This is the runtime component of the project and loads the API wrappers into your Linux system so that they're available to the Kernel. (I think)
2. The ndiswrapper utils, which is a command line tool to help you configure stuff and load your windows drivers.

fluxbuntu doesn't come with the ndiswrapper utils, or not that I could find anyway. So I had no way to load my Netgear driver. So off to http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/ to download the latest source (1.52). Of course the laptop can't connect yet so I have to use the PC, download the zip, copy it to a USB stick, move the stick across, manually mount it because hotplug isn't working either, then unzip it. Phew, right.

Now! This next bit below (in red) is WHAT I DID WRONG! This is for background and what to check if you're having similar problems. Don't do this!

It looked like the ndiswrapper util came pre-built so I just cd'd into ndiswrapper-1.52/driver and build the module

gordon> cd ~/ndiswrapper-1.52/driver
gordon> make

All worked fine. This generated ndiswrapper.ko which should be copied to /lib/modules//ubuntu/misc/ndiswrapper, taking a backup of the existing one just in case.

gordon> sudo cp ndiswrapper.ko /lib/module/2.6.22-14-generic/ubuntu/misc/ndiswrapper

And then, followed the steps as described in the last post. the only difference (ha!) was that ndiswrapper wasn't on the su path so I had to run it manually from ~/ndiswrapper-1.52/utils/ndiswrapper every time.

Everything seemed to work, except where the rest of the world saw their wlan0 interface enabled, I had nothing. modprobe reported ndiswrapper module had been loaded correctly. ndiswrapper -l reported the driver and device were both present. It wasn't until I checked my ndiswrapper version that I realised what was wrong

gordon> ndiswrapper -v
module version is too old!

I eventually realised that I should have compiled the ndiswrapper utils after all, particularly the loaddriver object file, There was a Makefile in the top level of the ndiswrapper-1.52 download which I'd missed.

gordon> cd ~/ndiswrapper-1.52
gordon> sudo make uninstall
gordon> make

BANG! Screens and screens of errors. it seems that Fluxbuntu comes with the gcc compiler, binutils and even the linx kernel header, but not the libc6-dev package which includes all the useful files like stdlib.h.

Well shit.

If I was on the internet then it would be easy via apt-get, but of course what am I trying to achieve today!?

Back to the PC and manually download the libc headers from http://packages.ubuntu.com. I needed

• libc6-dev
• libc6
• linux-libc-dev

These are .deb debian package files. Copy to USB stick, yadda yadda yadda, and install using dpkg.

gordon> sudo dpkg -i linux-libc-dev
gordon> sudo dpkg -i libc6
gordon> sudo dpkg libc6-dev

Aaaaand back to ~/ndiswrapper-1.52 to rebuild

gordon> cd ~/ndiswrapper-1.52
gordon> make
gordon> sudo make install

And it looks like we finally have a result! the step in the last post now work.

Sorry that was so long but it's covered a number of things including ndiswrapper gotchas, installing debian packages manually and discovering what's missing from a fluxbuntu basic install. don't get me wrong, fluxbuntu is in early stages and can' guess what setup and circumstances are going to affect everyone using their distro. Apart from these teething troubles it looks very nice otherwise. Maybe ensure a full set of build packages are n the installation CD would be nice though.