My Notepad

Netgear WG311v3 card on Fedora Core 4

I cobbled together enough parts to bring a broken old desktop computer from my basement back to life this weekend. I had some sort of stomach flu and was snowed in anyway, so it seemed as good a project as any. I wanted to create a lab box to run Fedora Core 4. The one new piece of hardware I bought for it was a Netgear WG311v3 wireless PCI card. I had assumed that by now Linux would recognize most hardware, but I was wrong. Wireless cards are still a battle.

Lesson Number One: Check for hardware compatibility before you buy. Try here or here.

I did not, so I ended up doing a lot of frantic Googling after I had already jammed the card into the computer. I did end up getting it to work with the help of a few sites. I thought I'd document a little of it in case anyone else is trying to use one of these cards.

Most discussions about wireless cards, including most of Netgear's, pointed me to the MadWiFi project, so I started there. I looked at the compatibility wiki page and even found Netgear WG311. I breathed a sigh of relief until I saw the note that said, "Rev 03 has a Marvell Chip, and is also not compatible (Device Information : 11ab:1faa (rev 03), Work with ndiswrapper)". Bummer.

Next stop was NdisWrapper and its list of compatible cards. Sure enough, Netgear WG311v3 was listed, and there was a link to a hint page that specified which files needed to be copied from the Install CD that came with the card. I decided I was ready to give it a try.

Steps I took:
In retrospect, the first step I should have taken was to run my "yum update" and update my kernel before I performed the rest of these steps. Instead, I updated my kernel at some point after I got this working and had to recompile my driver to get things working again. It looks like I might have to recompile the driver anytime I update the kernel, so you might want to keep the driver files handy somewhere.

Downloaded stable version of ndiswrapper (1.10 at the time) from SourceForge.

Printed out the Installation page from the ndiswrapper wiki.

Copied ndiswrapper tar to the Fedora box and started following the installation directions.

I didn't need to link to the kernel source. The Fedora install had already done that for me. The "make distclean" and "make install" went fine (mentioned something about the kernel being compiled with a blocksize that might cause issues with Windows drivers, but I forged ahead.)

The next step says "Important: Do NOT use drivers on your CD", but because the hint I read specifically mentioned WG311v3.INF and WG311v3XP.sys, I decided to try with them first. I could always go back and try the drivers listed in the wiki if those didn't work. So I copied them from the CD into a single directory on the Fedora box. From inside that directory I continued on to the next installation step and ran "ndiswrapper -i WG311v3.INF" and "ndiswrapper -l". Driver and hardware were both present. Nice.

I loaded the module using the next steps in the install and verified in the system log. Also nice.

The next steps involved configuring the interface to my network. I think I mistyped my WEP key the first time because my system hung when I tried to set the essid. Total freeze. Had to reboot. Not nice.

Unfortunately, the install process had only added the module to /etc/modprobe.conf. This wasn't enough to boot it so I had to go back and re-load the module before attempting the configuration again. This time I must have typed properly because all my commands returned a prompt.

I tried "ifconfig wlan0 up", but it wasn't enough for it to get its IP. I tried "dhclient", and that seemed to do the trick. I could ping websites. I loaded up a browser and confirmed I was live.

Next I had to figure out how to get it working on reboot. At this point, the installation wiki was not very helpful for me. I ran the ndiswrapper -m, but it said it had already added the line, and I remembered I ran the command back during the module loading section. A little more research helped me figure out how to load the module at boot for my Fedora Core 4.

echo modprobe ndiswrapper >> /etc/rc.modules
chmod +x /etc/rc.modules

Rebooted and verified. Module loaded as expected, but wlan0 remained unconfigured.

At this point I had a fever and needed a nap. I assumed the fever was due to the flu bug and not ndiswrapper. I just wanted to get this working. So I took the easy way out and appended the iwconfig and dhclient lines to /etc/rc.local and rebooted. The box came up and the interface came up. Good enough for the time being.

I'd still like to figure out how to get the right info into a /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file so I could remove the stuff from rc.local. I'd also like to figure out how to hide that WEP key so it wasn't just sitting out there in plain text.

Hopefully this post was useful to someone. I guess it will at least be useful to me after I'm forced to reinstall Linux because I broke something.