Hooray for NDIS Wrapper

I have been using a very old lucent (orinico) pcmcia wireless card on my laptop. FC5 has great support for this card, but the card itself is pretty outmoded, and I wanted an 802.11g card.

Being a good linux citizen I researched all the cards available from my local retailer to see which had support, and decided on a dlink DWL 630g. Unfortunately I didn’t research enough. Previous versions of this card use the fairly stable and well supported madwifi drivers, but the current card wearing this model number uses a Ralink 61t chipset. Campanies changing chipsets and keeping the same model numbers is one of those particularly annoying things that gets me cranky. But I had already paid my money and now just wanted to make it work.

There is an open source project to support the rt61 chipset, but it’s still in beta, so I thought I would try the ndiswrapper approach.

I have always felt running binary windows network drivers on linux kind of a black magic solution, and the fact the it worked at all kind of bothered me. But I didn’t expect it to work as well as it did. Read on for brief howto.

With livna enabled:

# yum install ndiswrapper

Install the windows driver from the included cd. The command for me was:

# ndiswrapper -i /media/AirPlus\ G/Drivers/Drivers/Win2KXP/NetRt61G.INF

Verify the install:

# ndiswrapper -l
Installed drivers:
netrt61g                driver installed, hardware present 

Load the module:

# depmod -a
# modprobe ndiswrapper

If you are using NetworkManager everything else should just work. To enable NetworkManager:

# chkconfig NetworkManager on

To restart NetworkManager so it detects your pcmcia card:

# service NetworkManager restart

Now using the NetworkManager applet you should be able to browser all available networks and connect to them without a problem.

To get the ndiswrapper module to load each time linux boots create a file in /etc/sysconfig/modules named: ‘ndis.modules’.

#!/bin/sh
modprobe ndiswrapper > /dev/null 2>&1

Make sure the file is executable:

# chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/ndis.modules

The module should now be loaded on system startup.