I am somewhat new to Linux and really new to SUSE. I bought a Netgear wireless card WG311v3 and installed it in my father inlaws computer to allow him to access the internet from his office. Unfortunately, I have yet to get it working. I loaded the ndiswrapper from cd 1 of SUSE and then proceeded to load the driver from the internet. I followed step by step instructions from the Novell site and from any other site that had solutions. I have been working on this for a week now and have even consulted with my instructor. Still no luck.

Latest problem is when after I unzip the driver and type ndiswrapper -i /tmp/driver/WG311v3.INF it says it is installed and then I type ndiswrapper -l and it gives me the error fatal error inserting ndiswrapper /lib/modules/2.6.16.13-4-default/updates/ndiswrapper.ko:Invalid argument. Where do I go from here.

Be gentle I am a IT student and am a newbie with Linux

Take a look at the SuSE how-to located here. See if that helps.

What exact drivers did you download from the net and from where?

I loaded the drivers from the Netgear site. Since that did not work I loaded the ones from the cd that came with the card. It still did not work. I then upgraded my SUSE 10.1 to SUSE 10.2 and downloaded ndiswrapper again using YAST2 and then tried the same commands of ndiswrapper -i WG311v3.INF and it says it is an invalid driver. I am at roots ends on this thing. Any more suggestions that might work? My instructor found another driver for the wireless card that was a driver NET311 that was on a linux site claiming to be an updated driver. It didn't work either. I am about to go get another card. I also have another question...could it be the fact that I am running a 64 bit processor?

Are you running a 64 bit version of SuSE? If so, from what I have read, you need 64 bit drivers.

According to Netgear's site here, they do not plan on making 64 bit drivers.

Additionally, did you upgrade to SuSE 10.2, or do a clean installation?

When you choose to use different versions of Ndiswrapper, you also must uninstall the old package before installing the newer version. This includes the version that comes with SuSE vs. the one from the net.

Finally, take a look at the Ndiswrapper page located here.

I did download SUSE Linux for 64 bit. I also downloaded the ndiswrapper 1.48. Which is supposed to have gotten rid of the 64 bit glitches.

Here is a screen capture from my terminal window of what I am receiving
linux-925j:/home/resims/Desktop # ndiswrapper -l
installed drivers:
wg311v3 invalid driver!
utils version: 1.9
driver version: 1.48
vermagic: 2.6.18.2-34-default SMP mod_unload gcc-4.1
openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-x86_64.iso

Does this help? This stuff is driving me crazy. Why do they make it so difficult? Is there any other card you can recommend that might be easier to install?

Oh and I did an upgrade

Yes, but if you are using the 64 bit version of SuSE, then you still need 64 bit drivers.



Then you have a new kernel and Ndiswrapper would most likely need to be recompiled for the new kernel. IF you did do so, you need to make sure that you uninstalled the drivers that came with SuSE, then recompile the downloaded version. See the Ndiswrapper page for uninstall instructions. However, they recently changed their site and a lot of helful hints for SuSE (distribution specific help) have not been updated yet, from what it looks like.

But the point is you still need 64 bit Windows drivers.




It's been a while since I played with my SuSE installation, but I have a Ralink wirless card and it works well. Also see this article on Ralink support.

You may also want to wait for SuSE 10.3, which us due out sometime this week. Hopefully support for wireless will be better.