NDIS Wrapper For Wireless LAN Cards Under GPL

An anonymous reader writes " Shortly after Linuxant has released their commercial DriverLoader, Pontus Fuchs has made an NDIS wrapper available under the GPL. Since some vendors refuse to release specifications or even a binary Linux-driver for their Wireless LAN cards he has decided to solve it himself by making a kernel module that can load Microsoft-Windows NDIS drivers. ndiswrapper has been tested with some BroadCom miniPCI cards and it seems to work on some laptops . With some more work it should be possible to support more cards. Hopefully this will be the case for the many owners of Linux laptops based on Intel's Centrino technology. Please contact Pontus if you are interested in helping out!"

Comments

That's Easy

[OctaneZ]

Here's a nice list at HP of cards that work.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

An NDIS driver provides functionality to make the card work. Its a standard way to operate with the card from a program if you dont know a particular card's interface. So no, NDIS does NOT support all the capacilities of the card as far as alternate forms of authentication and the little extra goodies the manufactorer puts in. But, it will get the card working with its basic functions which is better then not working at all.

Re:How

[OctaneZ]

At the bottom of the SF page:

Contact

You can contact me at pof (at) users.sourceforge.net.

Platform independent drivers

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

This wrapper sounds a bit like the UDI Project creates a universally consistent driver DDI across all platforms. All drivers are source code compatible for all platforms with an environment. Drivers are binary compatible between platforms with a common C ABI.

Unfortunately Caldera was the main weight behind this, back when they actually did something silly like write code to make money instead of sue. They fell on hard times and essentially pulled support, and it's been dead in the water since.

Re:Support supported cards

[pyros]

cards besed on the prism chipset and the orinnoco/hermes chipset(s) work very well. Cisco aironet cards have worked pretty well for me, too. I think the big stinkers are the broadcom based ones.

Re:one bad thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Read more carefully: There is a way to build it in 2.4.x since about yesterday.

Re:Support supported cards

[Kamel Jockey]

Likewise, I've also been able to use the Linux-WLAN-NG drivers to make various wireless adapters work under Redhat Linux versions 7.2 and 9. The devices that I have actually used successfully are:

• Proxim RangeLan-DS PC Card (oddly enough I can't get this card to work under Windows 98 or XP)
• Linksys WPC-11 v.3 PC Card
• Microsoft(!) MN-510 USB wireless adapter (works pretty well with Kismet)

I noticed that the README file included in the download mentioned a "BroadCom" wireless card. I'm curious as to whether or not this is the newer Linksys PCI wireless card (WMP11) which used to work with Linux-WLAN-NG before they changed the friggin' chipset from Prism2 to Broadcom.