Configuring A Wireless Card
I have searched and searched for a way to get wireless cards to work in Linux. Ndiswrapper is a great tool and i tried it but it would not work alone. It seems that a major problem with this wireless card and possibly others is that linux loads its own native drivers before loading any driver you have specified. This causes a conflict and stops either from working. What you need to do is disable the native card and then use ndiswrapper to load a driver. This works for this card and should for others. I did this with Ubuntu linux and the BCM4318. Let us know if these steps work for your card.
You may try this tutorial with other distros and wireless cards. Just keep in mind that some of the steps may need to be adjusted for your distro. You will also need to discover which native driver to disable depending on what type of card you have.
Step 1: Disabling bcm43xx
We need to disabled the pre installed driver, bcm43xx to prevent conflicts from the native driver and the new driver. The way we do this is by blacklisting it.
Open a text editor and open the file: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Don't disturb anything in the window except to add the new line: blacklist bcm43xx
After this, reboot and make sure that when you go to System > Administration > Networking there isn't a listing for your wireless connection
Step 2: Get ndiswrapper
Go to a terminal and type the following:
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
this might prompt you for your password and ask you to continue and such, its very easy, just go through it.
Step 3: Use ndiswrapper to configure the drivers
Get the drivers you need, i suggest the files contained in HERE. You should have the .inf and .sys files of the driver. If you use the ones i suggested they will be bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf
Once you have the driver, put them on the desktop and then go to a terminal and type:
sudo ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/bcmwl5.inf
this will install the driver
then, in the same terminal window, type:
sudo ndiswrapper -m
now restart and you will be able to connect to wireless networks. If you have a wep encryption on your wireless network, go on to step 4 below.
Step 4: Installing Network Manager
Network manager will allow you to connect to those wep encrypted networks.
Simply go to a terminal window and type:
sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
Let that install by typing your password and whatnot, then restart and you will be good to go, just click on it up in the corner and select your wireless network.
Still not working?
If you still cannot connect to a wireless network try running the following commands in terminal
modprobe ndiswrapper
and
echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules
If you have any problems feel free to contact me here. If you are using a different card and would like help, also feel free to send me a pm or post the card and the question. Let me know if this works for you.