Blog Post Record: Using ndiswrapper

Wow, apparently I made 8 blog-posts today (9 now), that’s a record ;)

Well, I’ve been away for a while as well, so…

Busy holiday, little time for the computer, and plenty of new projects, a new laptop, airport express, all the toys :)

I guess it’ll be a bit more quiet the coming days, as I said everything today ;)

But to give this post some information, here’s how to set up a Dell TrueMobile 1450 under Linux. (I got it working under Fedora Core 2)

1. Get ndiswrapper and the .exe file that came with your card.
2. Extract the .exe to a location on your disk.
3. Install ndiswrapper (make install).
4. Install the driver (ndiswrapper -i bcmw15a.inf).
5. Check if it worked (ndiswrapper -l).
6. If it worked, check iwconfig to see wlan0.

Now set up your wlan:

iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 key open 12345..6   # your hex WEP key
iwconfig wlan0 channel 11          # your channel
iwconfig wlan0 essid HEAVEN        # your ESSID, without quotes

You can test whether it finds your AP with iwlist wlan0 scan. I found that when you are unable to set your ESSID, it is because your WEP key is invalid. I don’t know Wi-Fi well enough, but it seems that you only need a valid WEP key and it’ll find your wlan.

If it’s associated, bring it up with ifup wlan0 and it’ll get an IP through DHCP.

It took me a while, especially the ESSID part. Also sometimes it can bark at you when trying to set your key, then you have to do:

iwconfig wlan0 key open
iwconfig wlan0 key open 12345..6   # your hex WEP key

Don’t know why, but that solved it.