WPC54G with ndiswrapper on an Fedora Core 8

Configuring WPC54G on a Fedora Core 9 is seriously dflock-1.1d.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gzaunting task. I did buy this card quite a while back but the problem is at home as I have the desktop never got around using the same. Also there were network cables around the house and Network Card 8139too was working quite fine.

I came to US on 7th February and figured that hotel has an unlimited access to internet but only problem is it's wireless internet and not the RJ45 cable one. Hence I had to get this working somehow to use my WPC54G with Fedora Core 9.

Sometime after trying to make this work I was finally able to use the b43 driver for quite a while untill b43 driver just stopped working one fine day. That happened when I moved from one room to another, from 2nd floor to 1st one.

I finally decided to make it work with the ndiswrapper driver thought that I should give it a try.

• First I downloaded the drivers published by Linksys/Cisco for this version of the card. I have WPC54G Ver 3.0 pcmcia card.
• Unzipped the downloaded files to see there really are drivers. They have 2 directories under Driver directory one for NT and another for 9X
• Use the driver listed in NT directory. You should fine LSBCMNDS.INF, a driver file there.
• Install ndiswrapper and kmod-ndiswrapper using your favorite installation tool. I used yum as fedora uses yum, from the livna repository.
• As I did not have any internet connection other than the wireless one can just download these packages off the repository to USB Flash drive or something and install them using rpm commands.
• After this you need to blacklist b43, b43legacy, b43xx drivers so that they do not handle the device and stop ndiswrapper from handling it. The way to do that would be edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file to add following

blacklist ssb
blacklist b43
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b43xx

• After this we will install the Windows driver that we downloaded from the Linksys site.
• Type ndiswrapper Drivers/NT/LSBCMNDS.INF at the command prompt. I am assuming that you are already in the unzipped directory for the drivers. If not you can give the full path of the driver file.

I had been able to connect to the internet using this new ndiswrapper driver. I did connect using this to an unsecured network at the hotel. So you would not see any references to the WPA configuration. My laptop connects to the internet by requesting the IP address and it connects to https://login.globalsuite.net, where I need to sign in with a common password.

So long.......hope this helps someone........

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