I finally solved my ndiswrapper issue. If you remember my previous rants, I could never get WEP to work with my Linksys WPC54G v1.2 card. It simply wouldn’t work for me. I think the problem was not with me but with my ndiswrapper module version. I was using 1.13rc1, while the current stable version is 1.17.
Stable release sucks, because they removed the whole debian folder. This means that making a deb package out of it, just became 100% more difficult. Yes, I could simply install from source, but I don’t like doing that.
Most modern linux systems use packages, and there is a very good reason for that. Unless you keep track of all the stuff you install, you will soon find yourself in dependency hell. In fact, each time you type make install you introduce a new set of dependencies that may possibly conflict with some package you will be installing 6 months from now. Unfortunately unless you tell your package manager that you installed something from source, it is not going to know, and it will fail to prevent dependency conflict.
1.16rc2 had the debian rules included but gave me funky error messages. So i settled for 1.15rc2. If you had similar issues, here is a step by step instruction:
1. Download 1.15rc2 source or another version. Note, this method is only going to work for versions 1.16 or lower. For 1.17 and above you need to do something more fancy.
2. Make sure you have all the dependencies (you will need kernel headers, and some other stuff):
apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
apt-get install dh-make
apt-get install fakeroot
apt-get install gcc-3.4
apt-get install build-essential
3. Untar the source, and cd into the directory
tar xvfz ndiswrapper-[current version].tar.gz
cd ndiswrapper-[current version]
4. Build deb packages using fakeroot:
fakeroot debian/rules binary-modules
fakeroot debian/rules binary-utils
5. The deb files will be built in the parent directory. So go one up, and install the packages using dpkg:
cd..
dpkg -i ndiswrapper-modules-[version]-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i ndiswrapper-utils_[version]-1_i386.deb
After that you can do the normal ndiswrapper magic. Since I had a previous version already installed this was all that I needed to do. WEP is working like a dream :)
The step by step howto instructions were shamelessly stolen from the super helpful ubuntu forums
Update Mon, June 19 2006, 08:39 PM
Fixed the last code segment.