Using ndiswrapper with the WMP54Gv4 (cont.)

Debian Sarge

Ahhh... back to the basics. Debian was the first serious Linux distro that I worked with. Over the years, I keep coming back to Debian, as a favorite distro. For this installation, I used the latest snapshot, building the iso images using jigdo.

Debian now comes with an option of doing the installation with the 2.6 series kernel, which I elected to try, This was a good choice.

I have always enjoyed playing with apt-get. It keeps getting better and better. With this install, I made sure that I installed the kerrnel source and development  packages, as well as synaptic, to make sure that I could check my dependencies, as I went along. KWifiManger is also an option with apt-get and I installed this helpfulpackage, so that I could see what was going on during the wireless card configuration. After all, I was a little rusty with Debian.

I did find a deb package for ndiswrapper, but this failed badly, so I installed the latest ndiswrapper 1.1 package from source. This compiled fine on my Debian installation, using the normal installation sequence;

make distclean
make
make install

I tend not to read the installation manuals when trying something new (ask my wife), but in this case, I found the ndiswrapper wiki page invaluable in getting my wireless up and running. ¹

Once the source ndiswrapper package was downloaded and installed, I used the Linksys Windows XP drivers (off the cd that came with the card) to install the Windows driver, using my rt2500.sys and Rt2500.INF files that are kept in a safe place.

As root user;

ndiswrapper -i <source directory of ralink drivers> Rt2500.INF

Then checked to see if the drivers were really there and working

ndiswrapper -l

Where I got the comforting response

Installed ndis drivers
rt2500 driver present, hardware present

Then I held my breath and loaded the driver;

modprobe ndiswrapper

No problems! Apparently the Debian kernel does not have an issue with the 4 stacks kernel problem. Since I had not used Debian in a while, I looked around and elected to manually add ndiswrapper to load at boot. Just add ndiswrapper to the /etc/modules file.

I continued, using my die-hard methods for getting iwconfig to recognize and bring up the Linksys card. 

iwconfig wlan0 key open xxxxxxxxxx channel 6 essid <your essid name>

The "open" parameter is also needed, as we will see further down this page.

Make sure that you replace  xxxxxxxxxx with your appropriate WEP key and <you essid name> with your essid name.

At this point, the expected output from iwconfig was being seen, KWiFiManager liked the signal, but I had no IP address when I tried to bring up the wireless card. In Debian;

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Still no signal to the outside and Debian failed to allow a connection to the internet. At this point, I went back to the ndiswrapper wiki installation guide for Debian. ¹

 Using this guide, I set up my /etc/netwok/interfaces file with the following values.

Note that In Debian, you need to disable (comment-out) any reference to you wired interface. In my case this was eth0.

# The primary network interface #auto eth0 #iface eth0 inet dhcp #    # address 192.168.0.101 #    # netmask 255.255.255.0 #    # network 192.168.0.0 #    # broadcast 192.168.0.255 #    # gateway 192.168.0.1     # dns-* options are implemented by the resolvconf package, if installed #    dns-nameservers 192.168.0.1         auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp pre-up if grep -q ndiswrapper /proc/modules; then :; else modprobe ndiswrapper; fi wireless_keymode open wireless_key xxxxxxxxxx wireless_essid default

Replace the xxxxxxxxxx with your approriate WEP key value.

Again, the system filed when the keymode was set to "restricted" so I changed this to "open" to get the system up. There is some confiusion about this when one compares it to the ndiswraper wiki Debian instructions, but my changes worked for me. ²

Bring up the network interface again;

/etc/init.d/networking restart

..and you should see that the internet connection comes up! Open Konqueror and try to connect to a web page.

On your next boot, the ndiswrapper module should come up and you have wireless acces in Debian!

For more a more detailed description of ndiswrapper on this wireless card, see my previous related pages. ³


References:

1. ndiswrapper wiki Debian installation reference

2. ndiswrapper Debian specific instructions

3. danleff's detailed ndiswrapper page