Using ndiswrapper with the D-Link DWL-G520 PCI Card

Date: 8/10/05

Introduction

This wireless PCI card uses the Atheros chipset. Remember, make sure that you check the proper revision number for your card, as chipsets do change with new revisions of many wireless cards. Running the command lspci showed the following information for my card.

01:08.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)


Fedora Core 4 Installation:

Unfortunately, Fedora Core 4 continues to suffer from the infamous kernel stack issue. You must download the Driverloader kernel with the 16 stack patch^.2 This kernel is identical to the core kernel and installs perfectly. Make sure that you download and install both the kernel and kernel-devel packages. This assures that you have the kernel source and necessary symlinks to the new kernel required by ndiswrapper.

    1. Determine what kernel that you are currently running by running uname -r in a terminal window.
  
     2. Download the kernel and kernel-devel packages from the Driverloader web site that match your running kernel. In my case, it was the default kernel, which showed up when running uname -r as vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4. 

    3. Reconfigure your bootloader (in my case, grub) to boot the new kernel image. Following the instructions, the new kernel should show up as vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.stk16 in the /boot directory. Don't forget to add new new initrd entry in grub, as well.

    4. Follow the basic installation of ndiswrapper, as per the wiki page. ¹ My Windows drivers supplied with the D-Link card worked fine for this installation. Do not run the ndiswrapper -m command to modify you modprobe.conf file, as we will make a custom entry here later.


Setting up the Wireless Card

 This is where things get a little complicated. I borrowed heavily from the ndiswrapper Fedora specific instructions. ³  I highly recommend following the linked instructions when setting up wireless via cable internet connections. However, I made some major modifications with the instructions to get the card to work. Specifically, I connect to Verizon DSL on my system, so some of the instructions noted below do not apply.


Setting up a Wired Connection using PPPOE (using a DSL connection)

The first step in this process involves setting up a DSL connection via a wired card. Assuming that you have a wired NIC card that has already been recognized by Fedora, use the Network Connection Tool (Start-->System Settings-->Network) to set up DSL. You will need to know your user id, password and location of the wired card, in most cases eth0. Fedora had a good deal of issues with doing this at boot, so I placed an icon on my desktop to enable my connection after booting.

Once your DSL connection is up and running, we can turn to wireless. In Fedora, you are going to modify your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ files to match the wireless card settings. As noted in the ndiswrapper with Fedora article, ³ Fedora has difficulty seeing wlan connections. So we will follow those instructions to create the ifcfg-eth2 and keys-eth2 files needed by Fedora. This will allow Fedora's Network Connection Utility to see the interface.

In the ifcfg-eth2 file, I added my essid assigned to the DSL modem.

In the keys-eth2 file, I added my WEP key (KEYS=xxxxxxxxxx) for my 64 bit WEP password key.

Reboot the system to allow Fedora to make it's necessary changes.

Here is where the trick comes in. You already have a PPPOE connection script set up  in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-Verizon (Which is what I named my PPPOE connection).  Using your favorite text editor, edit the key line in the DSL file to point to your newly configured ifcfg-eth2 file. look for the line that says;

ETH=eth0 and change the value of the ethernet to use to eth2 (in our example case here). Save the change and see if you can bring up  your original PPPOE connection in the Network Connection tool, by highlighting the PPPOE entry and clicking on "activate."



You should have a wireless connection using your DSL router/modem, with the resulting message "active" under Status. 

NOTE: Ignore the second eth2 configuration seen on the screen shot. While configuring my DSL connection, I was experimenting with the settings to see what would work.

References:

1. ndiswrapper installation instructions

2. Fedora Driverloader 16 stack kernel

3. Ndiswrapper with Fedora