This short tutorial will guide you through the installation of NDISWrapper, and how to set it up to work with your specific wireless adapter.
This article presumes that you cannot obtain a Linux driver for your specific wireless network adapter. If you can find a Linux version, you should definitely use that instead.
Otherwise, there should be a Windows version of the driver available. This will guide you through making that driver work for Linux.
So, first you’ll need to download NDISWrapper. At the time this post was published, the current NDISWrapper version was 1.49.
Now untar the file you just downloaded, and open a terminal. Change to the extracted directory.
Run these commands (in this order!):
make distclean cleanmakesudo make install
If all went well, you should now have NDISWrapper installed. Now you need to get the Windows driver for your adapter. Download and extract it. Look in the extracted directory for a file ending in .inf. This is the file that holds all the driver information. In some Linux distributions, you may be able to search for *.inf, which will return all inf filetypes.
Now go back to that terminal you used before. Change to the directory containing the inf file you found. Write down (or remember) the name of the file you found. Now run this command:
sudo ndiswrapper -i <name>.inf
Replace <name> with the name of the file. If all also goes well here, the driver should be installed. I suggest typing in a command line:
ndiswrapper -l
This will list all of your current drivers. The one which you just installed should show up there. It also wouldn’t hurt to run:
ndiswrapper -mndiswrapper -ma
You probably now need to restart your computer. If everything worked, you should have a good Internet connection!
If you have some trouble and Ubuntu, you can view my post about fixing when modprobe does not recognize NDISWrapper.
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