I’ll be honest, in all my time in Linux and Windows, I’ve had a lot of hassles coming from my wireless card. That’s not to say that’s it’s a perfect flop or anything like that, I’ve just had what I feel is more then my fair share of issues with it. For example, when I got my present laptop home, the first thing I tried to do was access the wireless that we had at home, only to find out it couldn’t connect, let alone see any networks. We opened part of the laptop up and found one of the wires that was meant to be connected to the wireless card had come loose, and had effectively killed wireless connectivity for me that night.

At the same time, running a Marvell chip on the wireless card is one of the worst things I’ve had to face, mostly due to the fact that it is rarely supported under Linux. In fact, I’m pretty sure I had it working in Linux for a grand total of a day, thanks to an update to NDISWrapper breaking it the following morning. My grudges aside, though, NDISWrapper is a highly powerful and the essential when you are installing your wireless card or wireless USB stick under Linux. With that being said, it is also very tricky too…

so if your wireless card does not work after I show you how to work with NDISWrapper, I only tried to help, and am showing you exactly what I’ve learned.

The first thing you have to do is install NDISWrapper, under Ubuntu, it is a simple

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper

but under Salix, you must install the front end for NDISWrapper as well. So if you’re in Salix, you have to run

su
slapt-get -i ndiswrapper
slapt-get -i ndisgtk

Once it has finished installing, if you open it up under your System menu, you should see something like so

This is how the NDISWrapper interface looks like, or at least the GTK version. From here, it’s a little simplistic my instructions, and it shouldn’t be that different for each card. Hit the ‘Install New Driver’ and point it to the Windows XP or 2000′s driver, in .INF format. If you do not have your driver’s .INF file, try installing the software for your wireless driver does give you in Wine, before going into your /home/username/.wine/program_files directory.

The worst part about NDISWrapper is that it’s not assured that it’s going to work with everyone. Check with the forum of the OS you use, the official documentation, Google, or even our forum to see if we can find you a solution. It might not be supported, but I know I’ll certainly try helping out anyone who needs help setting up their wireless.