Quick Reference to : NDISWRAPPER

Hardware drivers can be a real pain for Linux users. If the manufacturer does not release the specifications of its hardware, it can be difficult, if not possible, to reverse engineer the information needed to write a driver.

True, a few manufacturers are enlightened enough to release Linux drivers or information, but most are content with ensuring their product works with Windows.

While it would be nice be able to boycott such hardware, there’s not much we can do if the laptop’s integrated wireless card has no Linux driver.

Ndiswrapper is a driver wrapper that clever emulates the Windows Network Driver Interface Specification for wireless drivers, so that it can run the Windows driver that came with the card. Most distros include Ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper can be download from http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net. Install it using distro’s package manager, then load in the Windows driver. Look on the CD that came with the card for the INF file that corresponds to your card, and load it as root with

ndiswrapper -i /path/to/driver.inf

You can check that it is correctly loaded and available to Ndiswrapper with

ndiswrapper -l

Now it’s possible to load the driver at any time with

modprobe ndiswrapper

Add NdisWrapper to whichever file your distro uses for loading modules at startup. This varies between distros: Mandriva uses /etc/modules, SUSE uses one file for each module in /etc/modules.d and Gentoo uses /etc/modules.