Ndiswrapper

How to get wireless cards working with ndiswrapper

There are a couple of other guides around on this, but this should be a quick and easy way to get wireless cards working with Knoppix.

Loading ndiswrapper

Ndiswrapper is already in Knoppix, so you just need to get your windows xp driver loaded. You will need the .inf and .sys files. If you still have a driver cd for your card, you can probably find them there, or just download them from the manufacturer's website. Now you need to get those files onto your Knoppix machine and load them into ndiswrapper. If you copied them onto a flash drive, the command for ndiswrapper would look something like this:

# ndiswrapper -i /mnt/sda1/somefolder/drivername.inf

You can check to be sure the driver is loaded with

# ndiswrapper -l

If that told you the driver was loaded and the device was present then you can modprobe ndiswrapper

# modprobe ndiswrapper

Now your card should spring to life and will probably attempt to connect to any unsecured network nearby. If that is all you ask, then you are done! If you need security, read on.

Wpa_supplicant

If you need wpa security for you wireless card, then you need to set up wpa_supplicant. First you need to save your password in a file for wpa_supplicant using the "wpa_passphrase" command. Like this:

# wpa_passphrase essid password > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Now start wpa_supplicant like this:

# wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

You should now be connected to your secured network. You can check this with "iwconfig". You also should check "ifconfig" to see if your wireless adapter has received an ip address. If not, there is one more thing to do.

# pump -i wlan0

That should get you an ip address for wlan0. Substitute wlan0 for whatever the name of your wireless adapter is. Hooray! All should be well now!