Last time I installed ndiswrapper from source, and that was a mistake. When the time came to update the kernel headers and swap out the newest linux image apt was choking on the ndiswrapper module. I have been putting away dealing with that issue for a long time now because I was anxious to touch it. Wireless on linux is one of the things that always take minimum 5 hours to set up, regardless of how much experience you have with it.
But then again, running around with an unpatched laptop is probably worse than spending few hours cursing at my Linksys card… So I uninstalled the ndiswrapper-utils and ndiswrapper-modules and apt finally upgraded my system.
Strangely enough apt found a binary of ndiswrapper-utils in the repository somehow. It prompted me for the CD, and in few minutes I had the app working again. It even retained the windows driver that was loaded before. Yet, the system would not acknowledge wlan0 as a valid interface.
Dmesg showed me some strange messages too:
ndiswrapper version 1.0rc2 loaded (preempt=yes,smp=no)
ndiswrapper (wrapper_init:1494): loadndiswrapper failed (1792);
check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver
WTF? I uninstalled the driver, reinstalled it and then run modpobe again. That worked. No more strange errors! Yet my card still refuses to play nice with the network here…
But I had this problem before. I can’t associate my card with the WEP encrypted network at work, but when I go to school everything works fine. So I’m not sure how badly did I break things… I guess I’ll find it out on Monday…
