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.
- 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):
- Open a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), type lspci and press the return/enter key.
- Look through the output of the lspci command for an entry for your wireless card.
- Once you have identified your card, note down the contents of the first column, which should look like 0000:00:0c.0.
- Now, type lspci -n into the Terminal and press return.
- 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:
- Marvell 88w8335 "Libertas" chipset (PCI ID = 11ab:1faa)
- Realtek RTL8180 rev.20 chipset (PCI ID = 10ec:8180 rev20)
- Ralink rt2500 chipset (PCI ID = 1814:0201 and 13b1:000d)
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:
- 3COM 3CRGPC10075
-
A-Link WL54H
-
Acer Aspise 1353 LCi
-
Airnet AWD154 and AWN154
-
Airlink+ 802.11g Model AWLC3026
- Alpha AFW-N411
-
Asus WL-107G and A8V Deluxe Wireless Edition
-
Atlantis-land A02-PCM-W54 and A02-PCI-W54
-
Averatec 3200/6100 Series Laptop
-
Belkin F5D7000uk and F5D7010
-
CNet CWC-854 and CWP-854
-
Conceptronic C54RC
- Digicom Palladio Wave C
-
Digitus DN-7001G MV and DN-7001G RA
-
D-Link DWL-520 (Rev D1) and Air DWL-650
-
Edimax EW-7106PC, EW-7126PC, EW-7128g
-
Encore Electronics ENLWI-G, ENPWI-G
and ENPWI-B-RECA
- Foxconn-WLL-3350 PCI
-
Gericom PANWL 1102
-
Gigafast WF721-AEX
-
Hamlet HNWP110
-
Hawking HWC54D
-
Intellinet (Prod ID 521710)
-
Jensen Scandinavia Air:Link 6011 PCMCIA
-
Linksys WPC54G v5, WPC11 v4, WMP54G v4, WUSB54G v4
-
Longshine LCS-8531-R PCMCIA
-
Mentor WLG-PCI and WLG-PCII
-
Mercury/Kobian KOB WL445
- MSI PC54G2 PCI, Megabook S271 laptop
-
Netgear WG311 v3 and WG511 v2
-
Netcow FC-NC9010
-
NogaNet TWL542C PCMCIA
-
Option globetrotter (GT) Fusion
-
Peabird PEAB-WLG-PCI
-
Planet WL-8303
-
ROLINE RWA-54
- Sitecom WL-115
- Sweex Essentials Wireless PCI
, PCI 54MBPS 11g (rev 01)
-
TP-LINK TL-WN250 (ver 2.0) PCI
-
Topcom skyr@cer 4011b and skyr@cer PCI 111
- Trendnet TEW-421PC, TEW-226PC and TEW-228PI
-
X-Micro XWL-11BPRG
-
Zaapa ZW-P854-G
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.
- Have a look at this list and search
for the entries which correspond to your PCI ID.
- 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).
- 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.
- Run Ndisgtk from the System-> Administration->Windows Wireless Drivers menu.
- Click on "Install New Driver"
- 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).
- 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:
- sudo iwconfig (to see what the name of your card interface is (let's say it's wlan0 for instance).
- sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid galaxy
- sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
- 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.