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Ndiswrapper and Debian

Started by Strife Feb 18, 2005 at 1:04 PM 7 replies 5.5k views
Original Post
Strife
Strife
So recently, you may recall that my hard drive died. Well, when I had initially installed Debian on that drive, I was at my parents' where I had an ethernet connection to the Internet, but in my apartment I only have wireless access. (The first time around, I got it up and running no problem). So, I had to forego the network setup while installing and get to it later. Anyway, I manually downloaded the ndiswrapper packages while in Windows, and installed them. I installed the appropriate driver without a problem, and ndiswrapper -l displays my driver and says that the hardware is present, as it should. The problem arises whenever I try to run dhclient. The device (wlan0) does not find the DHCP server, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Is it possible that there's some net configuration I need to do that I skipped during the installation? If so, is there a way to rerun that configuration procedure, or must I change things manually? Also, I only have the default Sarge 2.4 kernel installed right now. Could this be the issue? I.e., is there some module perhaps that I don't have installed that should be? I have downloaded the 2.6 kernel and source, and I'll give that a try when I get home later tonight, but I just wanted to see if anyone else had any suggestions.
C-Junkie
C-Junkie
selected the right essid?
set up WAP correctly? or whatever other kind of encryption you're using.
James Trotter
James Trotter
Make sure that you've added the appropriate lines to your /etc/network/interfaces file. I think it should look something like this:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhpcp
pre-up modprobe ndiswrapper
post-down rmmod ndiswrapper

This will load the kernel module automatically when the system starts..

Hope this helps.
Strife
Strife
Quote:
Original post by C-Junkie
selected the right essid?
set up WAP correctly? or whatever other kind of encryption you're using.

Previously I didn't have to do anything like this. I simply ran dhclient, and voila, everything worked.

Quote:
Origianl post by James Trotter
Make sure that you've added the appropriate lines to your /etc/network/interfaces file. I think it should look something like this:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhpcp
pre-up modprobe ndiswrapper
post-down rmmod ndiswrapper

This will load the kernel module automatically when the system starts..

Hope this helps.

Minus the pre-up and post-down part, that's what I have. I actually just added ndiswrapper to /etc/modules (or whatever the file is). It was this way on the previous installation. If the 2.6 kernel doesn't fix the problem, I'll give that a try.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.
C-Junkie
C-Junkie
the /etc/modules method should work. (in fact, hotplug should work, but considering ndiswrapper is not open source, hotplug may be unaware of it)

Did you have to download firmware or anything like that?

Maybe there's a howto someplace that you followed before that you could again?
Strife
Strife
Quote:
Original post by C-Junkie
the /etc/modules method should work. (in fact, hotplug should work, but considering ndiswrapper is not open source, hotplug may be unaware of it)

Did you have to download firmware or anything like that?

Maybe there's a howto someplace that you followed before that you could again?


I was thinking that possibly there was a HOWTO, but so far I haven't been able to find anything that says anything that I haven't done yet that I recall seeing... I keep trying to install all the 2.6 required packages in order to install everything, and I keep forgetting one so I have to restart... This is getting to be a pain. Hopefully I'll get it working here in a bit.
James Trotter
James Trotter
I had problems with my network card in 2.4, as well. Apparently the system was totally unable to detect it. It worked fine in 2.6, though. What kind of card do you have? Do you have the latest version of ndiswrapper?
Charon
Charon
i had a similar problem with a normal built-in ethernet card in my laptop after installing a new kernel (switch from 2.4 to 2.6)

when booting the old kernel i had no problem with dhcp, booting the new kernel failed though (althoug a manual "pump -i eth0" worked).

try :
dpkg-reconfigure dhclient

if that doesnt work uninstall your current dhclient with the "--purge" option (so the configuration-files for it get deleted) and install it again


hope i could help
Charon
chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is finished

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