Wireless Howto

From GoboLinux Knowledge Base

First of all, my network card is a Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN pci card built-in in my laptop P4 Compaq Presario 2568. I didn't found Linux kernel drivers for it, so I used the drivers of my WinXP installation.

What I needed to have it working was basically:

• Install the package WirelessTools
• Get the Win drivers for the wireless device and the .inf file correspondent
• Install the ndiswrapper program
• Use ndiswrapper to install the driver. This is the easy part, just run:

ndiswrapper -l DRIVER.inf
ndiswrapper -m

as gobo.

• Use WirelessTools to configure the interface and to find an wireless network available
• Use ifconfig to open the interface and DHCP to configure the connection.
• Browse the web

You can automate some of this by adding a line to /S/S/modprobe.conf of install wlan0 modprobe ndiswrapper && iwconfig wlan0 ... (put your usual commands here, with && between) and then adding wlan0 to /S/S/BootOptions with the right config.