NDIS Wrapper vs Mad Wifi?

[michael_n]

Can anyone help me to understand if it is better to use NDIS Wrapper or Mad Wifi?

I have an Acer 3100 notebook with an Atheros adapter and I can't use it as of yet. By the same token, does anyone know if Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, Belkin or Dynex cards are supported out of the box? I might just by one if it's simpler in the long run.

Thanks, Mike

[bbfuller]

Hello michael_n

Welcome to the forum.

I'm no expert on wireless, it's one of Linux's last really frontier areas. I do use it on a couple of machines but as no-one else has picked up the ball I'll try and give you a basic rundown.

I'm not aware of any manufacturer who makes Linux wireless drivers available for their product, indeed, some seem to go out of their way to conceal the information necessary for others to write suitable drivers.

There are classes of cards where the Linux Community has managed to provide working drivers for certain chipsets. MadWiFi for Atheros and b43 for Broadcom are two that spring to mind.

These are generally reckoned by the community to be morally more acceptable in the spirit of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) than the alternative which is to use the manufacturers Windows driver with something called ndiswrapper - which as it's name implies, wraps itself around the windows driver and makes it useable by Linux.

Just to further muddy the waters, some cards will work faster with ndiswrapper than the Linux native drivers, and some will work with one method but not the other.

Both ways of using wireless though are always playing catch me up and there is no guarantee that either approach will work with the latest wireless cards.

For the Atheros card in your laptop you need more information about just what chipset is contained in it. Issuing the command:

/sbin/lspci

from the command line should list your card, among everything else, and enable you to identify it.

/sbin/lspci -v

will give you more information but the first will probably be enough to identify the chipset.

A search on the forum, or the madwifi site should give a clue as to if your card is supported yet. As indeed may the ndiswrapper site here:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.php?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,list/

As to buying a different card, I'd exhaust the possibilities of the one you have first. It's a sad fact that manufacturers feel at liberty to alter the chipset in their wireless cards without warning.

If you are lucky they "may" add a version number to the cards designation - but they may not. As an indication, the Belkin F5D7000 was up to version 6 when I got mine, each with a different chipset. The only way to find out which version you are getting usually is to open the box, which doesn't always go down well with a retailer.

Post back if you have any further questions.

[Thetargos]

I'm on the same boat. My girlfriend has an Acer 5050-4697 laptop, that comes with an Atheros wireless card, now things get a bit tricky as the card wouldn't work with the open source drivers, and as of a few updates (when the laptop first received the 2.6.23.1-49 kernel) the ath_pci driver no longer loads (previously it would load, but NOT conect, as one might expect). The problem with this particular model apparently has to do with the fact that it sports a 5007EG chip rather than a 5006EG one, BUT lspci reports it to be a 5006EG instead of the newer model. Now apparently the system is "blind" to it, and even though I have configured the Windows driver with ndiswrapper, and even though the driver actually loads, the system is blind to the card... Guess I'll have to check kudzu's system map or check somewhere where it might be blacklisted. This would be about the last thing to do with this lappy, but I don't seem to be able to get it working (for the time being). Hopefully the Mad-WiFi folks will get this chipset working with the driver, and as an end result it might cascade into the kernel drivers that are already present.