(I am using (x)ubuntu here, but emerge in gentoo should be as useful as the debian-pkg-management (synaptics))
1. Step
Check if you have the right card (“lspci -v”):
00:10.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)
Subsystem: Netgear WG311v3 802.11g Wireless PCI Adapter
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 9
Memory at e8010000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
2. Step
Get ndiswrapper-common and ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 over synaptics/ubuntu-pkgm.
3. Step
Get the .inf-File from your Driver-CD (winxp-ver). If you don’t want to search it through your cd-collection just use the one from ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net. It should work for sure.
4. Step
sudo ndiswrapper -i <your-inf-file-here.inf>
Check if everything is fine:
ndiswrapper -l
mrv8000c : driver installed
device (11AB:1FAA) present
5. Step
Create your “driver-module” with ndiswrapper.
ndiswrapper -m
Add it to the Kernel.
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
[6. Step]
Add ndiswrapper to /etc/modules (may vary for your distribution) for autoloading at boot time.
Problems
- Check that ndiswrapper could read the .inf-file correctly. Was root needed etc?
- Did you choose the wrong driver inf? It has to be the winxp-version.
- To start all over again:
- ndiswrapper -r <yourpackage(s)>
- make sure suspicious (=looking like <yourpackage(s)>) files in /etc/ndiswrapper/ were deleted