using ndiswrapper

I picked up a D-Link DWL-G122 yesterday. It’s a miniature USB-based wireless network adapter. I’ve been eyeing the USB wireless adapters for quite a while for it’s mini/coolness factor but haven’t really had a need or burning desire to drop an money on it.

I finally gave in and bought one as I felt my life wasn’t frustrating enough. Okay, actually I just wanted to be able to easily carry around a wireless adapter for any of my growing list of machines that I own. I was leaning towards the equivilent hardware from Linksys but all they had at London Drugs was the D-Link version. As it turns out, the D-Link wasn’t a bad choice as it’s listed as being supported using ndiswrapper.

ndiswrapper is a neat project that basically uses native Windows drivers in order to use hardware under Linux. But, like everything that I try hardware-wise, it wan’t simply a ‘compile and plug it in’ like I’d hoped.

ndiswrapper is up to version 1.0 with 1.1 on the horizon, but in the Gentoo portage package only 0.12 is listed as “stable”. So I installed 0.12 with no issues and grabbed the latest drivers from the D-Link site. When I plugged in the G122, I was greated with “probe of XXXX:YY.ZZ.A failed with error -22”. Great. I then tried updating to version 1.0. Same thing. A quick search of the net, however, turned up an entry in the FAQ telling me that it was an IRQ conflict. Ironically, though, while searching for how to troubleshoot IRQ conflicts I came across a posting on an ndiswrapper forum that ndiswrapper doesn’t always play nicely with the high speed USB driver. I removed that module et voila, it worked. Since the FAQ is run off a Wiki, I updated the entry such that the problem might lie with the USB modules.

Make sure you also grab the proper driver; the DWL-122 is NOT the same as a DWL-G122. The DWL-G122 driver can be downloaded from the Canadian D-Link site [USA site].

Now my only problem is that my machine locks up if I remove the adapter from the machine without first removing the ndiswrapper kernel module. Will the fun ever end?

Update: my machine no longer locks up. See my entries on March 7, 2005 and March 29, 2005.

1 comment »

1. By Shane 4 months later:

   
   
   Hello sir! I have been trying to make my DWL-G122 working with ndiswrapper. I made it work, but have some problems, dmesg shows "ndiswrapper (iw_set_tx_power:354): setting tx_power failed (80000005)", I have the problem described here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-352119.html I wonder if you know anything about this, Thanks!