mintWifi

The purpose of  mintWifi is to allow you to configure your wireless card without an Internet connection. To achieve this purpose mintWifi gathers documents such as this web page, tools such as ndiswrapper and ndisgtk and a collection of drivers.

1. Load ndiswrapper

If your card doesn't work out of the box and there is no Linux driver for it, don't despair! mintWifi comes with ndiswrapper, which allows most Wireless cards to work under Linux with a Windows driver. All you need is a Windows driver: a directory that contains an INF and eventually a SYS file.
  1. Open a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and type sudo modprobe ndiswrapper to load ndiswrapper. 
Note: If this didn't work and you get an error message like the one below, just ignore it and proceed to section 2:

FATAL: Error inserting ndiswrapper (/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/kernel/drivers/net/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper.ko): Invalid argument

2. Identify your Wireless card's chipset and its PCI ID

The important thing is to identify exactly which chipset is used by your wireless card. You need to identify your card's chipset in order to know exactly which driver will work for it. Follow the steps below to find out your card's PCI ID (which uniquely identifies your chipset):
  1. Open a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), type lspci and press the return/enter key.
  2. Look through the output of the lspci command for an entry for your wireless card.
  3. Once you have identified your card, note down the contents of the first column, which should look like 0000:00:0c.0.
  4. Now, type lspci -n into the Terminal and press return.
  5. Find the PCI ID for your device. Your device will be referred to in the output of the command by the identifier which you just made a note of, e.g. 0000:00:0c.0. The PCI ID will be in the third column of the output and will be in the form 104c:8400.
Note: If you're using a USB Wireless adapter. Your PCI ID is actually called an USB ID and you can find it by typing lsusb in a Terminal.

3. Get the Driver from mintWifi

In Bea, mintWifi supports the following chipsets:
Hopefully this means that if you own one of the following cards or hardware, you won't have to connect to the Internet for it to work:
Don't pay too much attention to the list though. What's important is your PCI ID. Have a look in /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintWifi/drivers to see if there's a directory corresponding to your PCI ID (for the directory names we replaced the semicolon with an underscore) . If there is, then you'll find the driver for your card in it and you can go directly to section 6. 

4. Get the Driver from your CDs

Your wireless card probably came with some CDs which contain the Windows drivers for it. If you didn't find the driver in mintWifi, now would be the time to go and look for these CDs.
Note: When you insert a CD in Linux Mint it usually gets mounted into /media/cdrom0 (you might find that information usefull in section 6).

5. Get the Driver from the Internet

If your didn't find the driver in mintWifi and if you lost your CDs, then the last option is to download it from the Internet.
  1. Have a look at this list and search for the entries which correspond to your PCI ID. 
  2. Find the best entry and download the corresponding driver (you'll need an Internet connection for this or use a different computer to retrieve the driver). 
  3. If your Driver comes as an .exe or .cab file, in a Terminal use the commands unshield, unzip or cabextract to extract the drivers from them.

6. Install the Driver

To install the driver we'll use a graphical tool called ndisgtk.
  1. Run Ndisgtk from the System-> Administration->Windows Wireless Drivers menu.
  2. Click on "Install New Driver"
  3. Click on "Location" and browse to point at the location where the .INF file for your Windows driver is (/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintWifi/drivers/1010etc.. for mintWifi, /media/cdrom0/...etc for the CD).
  4. Click "Install" 
Ndisgtk should show an entry for your driver which says "Hardware present: Yes". To know if your card has been recognized, open a Terminal from the Applications->Accessories->Terminal menu and type iwconfig. An entry should be there for your card. If this didn't work, you need to get a better driver (sections 3, 4 and 4).

7. Configure the card

If you see an entry in the Terminal when you type iwconfig then your card is recognized and all you need to do is configure it. The Network Manager (icon on the right of the Gnome panel) should detect it and use it automatically. However, it has some problems with some cards. If this is the case for you, you need to deactivate the Network Manager: right click on it and deactivate Wireless and Networking.

Now you can use the more traditionnal way of setting things up. Go to System->Administration->Networking and set up your Wireless card.

Note: You can also use the command line to configure your card. For instance to use DHCP and the "galaxy" ESSID, do the following:
  1. sudo iwconfig (to see what the name of your card interface is (let's say it's wlan0 for instance).
  2. sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid galaxy
  3. sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
  4. sudo dhclient
Note: Some card don't allow "scanning", and some card don't support encryption. If things don't work for you, try to set your network ESSID and don't use encryption.

8. Once everything works

Once everything works you can type sudo ndiswrapper -m in the Terminal. And add the following line to /etc/modules:

ndiswrapper

9. Tell us if things worked out

Don't hesitate to come and tell us if things went right or wrong. Come and talk to us on the IRC channel (Applications->Internet->XChat-Gnome)  or on the forums http://www.linuxmint.com/forum 

Good luck.
The Linux Mint Development Team.