Blog-post record - Using ndiswrapper

Wow, apparently I made 8 blog-posts today (9 now), that's a record ;) Well I've been away for a while as well, so..

Busy holiday, little time for computer, and plenty of new projects, a new laptop, airport express, all the toys ;)

I guess it'll be a bit more quiet the coming days, as I said everything today ;)

But to give this post some information, here's how to set up a Dell truemobile 1450 under linux. (I got it working under Fedora Core 2)

Get ndiswrapper and the .exe file that came with your card.
Extract the exe to a location on your disk
Install ndiswrapper (make install)
Install the driver (ndiswrapper -i bcmw15a.inf)
Check if it worked (ndiswrapper -l)
If it worked, check iwconfig to see wlan0

Now set up your wlan
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 key open 12345..6 (your hex WEP key)
iwconfig wlan0 channel 11 (your channel)
iwconfig wlan0 essid HEAVEN (your essid, without quotes)

You can test with iwlink wlan0 scan (I believe) if it finds your AP.

I found that when you are unable to set your essid, it is because your WEP key is invalid. I don't know WiFi tech enough, but it seems that you only need a valid WEP key and it'll find your wlan.

If it's associated, bring it up with ifup wlan0 and it'll get an ip trough dhcp.

It took me a while, especially the essid part. Also sometimes it can bark at you when trying to set your key, then you have to do:

iwconfig wlan0 key open
iwconfig wlan0 key open 12345..6 (your hex WEP key)

Don't know why, but that solved it.

2 Comments

  • I was unable to get my WLAN card working using the ndiswrapper under Gentoo with kernel 2.4.27, which sucks because I've got a Realtek rtl8180 based card and I want to run the 2.6 kernel. I was able to get the 2.4 drivers from Realtek working under Gentoo. I may have to try it again since I think I had an IRQ problem and not a problem with the actual driver.



    Is the Dell trumoble a Realtek based card? I couldn't get a laptop with the Dell card to stay connected to my home WLAN at all. Kept dropping off after it would connect.

  • iwlink wlan0 scan should actually be iwlist wlan0 scan. My card gets assigned wlan2, does any have a clue how the assignments work?

Comments have been disabled for this content.