Angelo’s Notepad

Yesterday I got a Belkin notebook wireless card [Belkin F5D6020 (Version 3.0) 802.11b wireless PCMCIA] for my laptop that runs Debian. I spent the entire evening, but I eventually got it to work using a wonderful tool called ndiswrapper which allows you to use Windows network drivers in Linux. The version numbers are important because they correspond to different chipsets that are on the card. I started by doing an apt-get install ndiswrapper\* but you should see below that the current version for Debian doesn’t work.

Getting the Windows Drivers:
The first issue I had was with the CD that came with the card. I haven’t tested the CD on Windows, but it had I/O errors when trying to read it from Linux. I wonder if this is a Windows vs Linux CD format issue, or if it’s just a bad CD. I have to think it’s the latter. So I went to the Belkin site and downloaded the driver .exe file for Windows 98. (In this case, I pretty much believed that all of the drivers for Windows were the same file, but usually Windows 98 is the safest to try.) Unfortunately this .exe is an installer for the software, so I had to use wine to run it, install it in my fake windows, and copy the drivers out. After using wine to install, the drivers can be found in ~/.wine/fake_windows/windows/OPTIONS/CABS/ and they are called bel6020.inf and Bel6020.sys. You can copy these files anywhere (such as to your home directory) or you can use them directly from this directory because when you install them into ndiswrapper, it will make a copy for itself under /etc/ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper:
The next problem I had was with the version of ndiswrapper that comes with Debian. Despite following the steps (see links below) I had found online, the driver simply wouldn’t work. ndiswrapper -l reports that everything is fine, but if you use dmesg, you will see that something doesn’t work–in my case at least that it could not allocate the memory for this driver. I downloaded the source and compiled the latest version (0.12) which solved the problem. (You should use dmesg and lspci to make sure the install went well.)

$ /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i bel6020.inf
$ /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -l
$ /sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
$ dmesg
$ lspci
$ /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m


Creating the wireless interface:
Since my first attempts to use the older version of ndiswrapper didn’t work, I struggled with trying to figure out why I couldn’t set up the wireless interface. After I used the newer version, it worked, but still doesn’t bring up the interface automatically on boot. It doesn’t remember the essid. (This is still unresolved.) But the good news is, I can configure and bring up the interface by hand after boot. You need to install wireless-tools. Use iwgetid to get an essid, and iwconfig to set up the interface.

$ /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid default
$ /sbin/ifup wlan0


Links:
http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9758