belkin card

Configuring Belkin F5D6020 (Version 3.0) 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card on MandrakeLinux 10.1
Submitted by akkumar on Thu, 12/16/2004 - 05:15. General Interest | How-to | Quick Tips & Newbies | Distributions

I had bought a Belkin Wireless PCMCIA Card – F5D6020 (Version 3.0) recently and wanted to configure the same in my favourite Linux distribution.

I downloaded and installed the MandrakeLinux 10.1 distribution released recently to the public (on December 6 2004 ). To get the latest version of MandrakeLinux visit the home page of MandrakeLinux, here. If you have a DVD writer, go for the DVD image. It would be much easier to maintain instead of playing around with the 3 CDs .

The installation was a breeze with MandrakeLinux 10.1 identifying my PCMCIA card attached to my laptop while installing the system. It did not load the right module corresponding to the PCMCIA card, though. So I had to find the right module to get that done. I did not get the Linux device driver from the manufacturer, but I did have the Windows driver.

Thanks to the ndiswrapper project at sourceforge, I was able to use the Windows device driver (already installed on my dual-boot system) for my Linux distribution too. I downloaded the latest source code of ndiswrapper from its sourceforge project page . The version that I had downloaded was 0.12 released on November 24 2004. The project documentation available at the site was pretty much clear to get things done.
1. Compiling ndiswrapper:

To compile ndiswrapper, you would need the source code of the kernel. By default, the kernel source was not installed. I installed the kernel source corresponding to the 2.6 tree (kernel-source-2.6.8.1-12mdk, to be exact) .

[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ pwd
/home/akkumar/tmp
[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ tar xzvf ndiswrapper-0.12.tar.gz
[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ cd ndiswrapper-0.12
[akkumar@localhost ndiswrapper-0.12]$ make install

This would compile the ndiswrapper utility and compile the module to be loaded later to identify the device.
2. Copying the Windows device drivers:

By default, MandrakeLinux identifies the NTFS parititions on your hard disk used by Windows. I am running Windows XP, and I had already configured my wireless card for the operating system. The windows device driver corresponds to two files, namely an INF file and a SYS file. Search for the following files in your Windows directory. ( C:\Windows\System ) .

* Bel6020.inf
* Bel6020.sys

Copy the two files to a directory of your choice in linux, say /home/akkumar/tmp .

Now go ahead to configure this Windows device driver using ndiswrapper as follows.

[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ ndiswrapper-0.12/utils/ndiswrapper -i Bel6020.inf

This would install the device drivers. To check the status of your device drivers, invoke the following command.

[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ ndiswrapper-0.12/utils/ndiswrapper -l

You should see something like this:

Installed ndis drivers
bel6020 hardware present
3. Load Modules:

To load the module, invoke the following command.

[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ modprobe ndiswrapper

Use the 'dmesg' command to view the kernel log to see if everything works fine till now. Refer to this documentation on the site to double-check the same.
Assuming everything goes fine, all that needs to be done is to specify a wireless SSID to connect to.
4. Configuring the wireless interface:

If you know your wireless SSID correctly, invoke the following command.
[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ iwconfig wlan0 essid MYESSID

At this point, the LED on your wireless card should start glowing, if everything works fine till now.

Once this happens the network interface ought to be brought up.
[akkumar@localhost tmp]$ ifup wlan0

Wait for a couple of seconds and then, you should be connected to the network right now. So yes, we had indeed succcessfully configured our wireless card to work with MandrakeLinux 10.1 , thanks to the ndiswrapper utility.
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Great tutorial ;-)
Submitted by k4m3leon on Sun, 06/19/2005 - 18:59.

Great tutorial ;-)
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