Newbie Here Wireless card not found!!!!

[ptc510]

Hello,
I am extreamly new to Knoppix and I am having a problem configuring my wireless network card. I have a Dell Lattitude D-810 which has the Dell wireless 1370 WLAN Mini PCI card. When I boot into KNoppix during the start up it does say that Network Device eth0 detected- Broadcasting DHCP for IP. WHen I go to the wireless network card config wizard it tells me that there is no card installed. Help Please.

[UnderScore]

The dell wireless 1370, according to Dell's own info (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/learnmore/learnmore.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~id=dfamilywireless&~line=notebooks&~mode=popup&~series=inspn&~tab=details) uses a Broadcom chipset. Broadcom does not support Linux because they give out no documentation of their chips & products and this results in no Linux drivers for broadcom wireless devices. The Linux community has reverse engineered a broadcom driver, but I do not think it is avaiable on Knoppix. So this means that we must use a driver wrapper called ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sf.net). It is a translator driver that makes a network card driver for MS Windows work on Linux.

Normally the progression of how drivers work looks like:
Linux kernel -> Linux network driver -> network card

With Ndiswrapper, it looks like:
Linux kenerl -> ndiswrapper -> Windows network driver -> network card

So now you see that it requires not 1 but 2 pieces, the ndiswrapper & the windows driver. Well, Knoppix versions from 3.8.x to currently 4.0.2 (and soon to be released 5.0) include ndiswrapper so this piece is already done for you. There is no need to download & compile/install it. So now all that is left is to get the windows driver piece to work. You can follow the generic ndsiwrapper installation instructions at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation#Install_Windows_driver and you can find Network card info listed alphabetically by manufacturer at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List#L

[ptc510]

Thanks I will give it a try....

[ptc510]

The driver is in .sys form not Inf and the wrapper is telling me that it has to be .inf. What now?

[dvryknopper]

google the name of your driver, but instead of the .sys type .inf