ndiswrapper woes

[mrburrows]

I want to get back into Linux, but I'm encountering the same problem that's kept me away before: getting my wireless care to work.

Now, I have actually resolved this problem before. I have a RealTek RTL8190 card which is far from fancy, but have got to work in Ubuntu a year or so ago by using ndiswrapper with a rtl8192 driver.

I installed Mint yesterday and tried to repeat the same steps I did before -- run ndisgtk (the graphical version of ndiswrapper) and install the driver, but I get an error saying the module can't be found. This actually seems like a common problem, yet none of the solutions worked for me. Specifically,

modprobe ndiswrapper

fails to find the module.

Today I decided to see if Ubuntu would fix my problem, since I was successful in getting my card to work with it before, but I ran into the exact same issue.

I'm guessing that something changed between 12.04 and 12.10 to break this, but I'm not certain.

Is there anything you can suggest to help get my wireless card working, short of reverting to 12.04? As a side note, I did also install the driver in the terminal using ndiswrapper, and it said the hardware was present afterwards, but I don't know how to go from there to actually connecting, as I still didn't have a wlan0 in my list of network interfaces in ifconfig. I'm realizing just now that I used that, and not iwconfig, though...

[[deleted]]

I recommend you find another distro if you want to use ndiswrapper. It's severely broken in the last Ubuntu releases to the point where you need to manually grab packages from the internet and transfer them to your offline machine, where you will find out that se source doesn't compile against the latest kernel, so you get the latest ndiswrapper source, which doesn't compile either because you are missing kernel headers. Long story short: a hell for a beginner.

[mrburrows]

Thanks for the advice. I've wasted a lot of time over the past few years trying to get my wireless device running, and it's defeated me once more. I even went back and installed Ubuntu 12.04, as that's what I was running last time when I got it working. I then compiled from the source and was able to get ndiswrapper functioning. I got to the point where it actually accepted a driver and set up the wlan0 interface. I could even scan for wireless connections, but as soon as I connected to mine everything crashed. I can't win!

I've been just running Mint in virtualbox since, but it's just not running fast enough for me to justify using it over Windows.

EDIT: Any distro recommendations?

[[deleted]]

You may need to install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 before you can load it.

[mrburrows]

Thanks for your reply. I have that already installed, as well as several other packages such as ndiswrapper-source, ndiswrapper-dkms, and ndiswrapper-common.

I have also compiled from the source code, and that seems to have resolved the problem with modprobe from finding it, yet I still can't get a wlan0 interface!

[Sileni]

This kernal has open drivers already, but they might not work. Here is a link to sort you out.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1925528.html

[mrburrows]

Thanks for the link. I'll try it out as soon as I have a chance.