How do I manually install a driver?

English Network/Internet
1

Hey all, I’m fairly to openSuSE and Linux and general and I need to know how to manually install a driver for my network adapter.

I’ll give you all the background for the situation and see if anybody has any advice for me:

I just recently installed openSuSE 11.0 on my desktop (dual booting w/ Vista), and can’t seem to get any internet connection. After checking out the Network information in yast, it gave me the message:

Unable to configure the network card because the kernel device (eth0, wlan0) is not present. This is mostly caused by missing firmware (for wlan devices). See dmesg output for details.

I went ahead and found out that my network adapter on this machine was:
Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller

And in some other thread somebody had mentioned that the driver isn’t in the kernel used by OpenSuSE 11 …so

On Atheros Communications website I found a selection of drivers:
Atheros Communications

First I was wondering which of these drivers listed I might be able to use (a couple that stood out listed below):
AR81Family-linux-v1.0.1.0.tar.gz
l1-linux-v1.2.40.3.tar.gz

In addition, how might I go about manually installing it on my machine?

Please tell me if there is any other information that you need from me :smiley:

2

Also don’t know if its important, but I’m using the openSUSE 11 64 bit.

I was going to just edit the post, but I didnt see the option :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Madwifi or Ndiswrapper Wireless Network Drivers - Suse/openSUSE 10, 11 - LAN & Internet access

Download the XP 64bit driver and then install ndiswrapper. Follow the instructions in the link.

4

So I went ahead and downloaded the xp 64 bit driver and followed the steps for the ndiswrapper and I’m not sure what to do next.

It mentions something along the lines of “All being well, you can now proceed to configure the wireless device in Yast for Internet and LAN access.” but I’m not seeing any changes in yast.

Edit:
Just for reference, I downloaded this file-
AR81FamilyWinSetup_1.0.0.39_WHQL.rar
unzipped it and just took the Windows XP 64 bit folder out ( I’m assuming thats what I was supposed to do as I didnt seem to run into any of the issues they mentioned in that article)

5

So, is the ndiswrapper module loaded? Some useful console commands (su to root first):

lsmod |grep ndiswrapper (to check if module loaded)
modprobe ndiswrpper (to load ndiswrapper module manually)
ndiswrapper -l (check what network driver installed)

6

Yep, pretty sure the module loaded.

when using the ndiswrapper -l command, my output was in the desired format…
abcde : driver installed
device (xxxx:xxxx) present

7

Check here again
Madwifi or Ndiswrapper Wireless Network Drivers - Suse/openSUSE 10, 11 - LAN & Internet access

8

Ok, now you can proceed to configuring your device via

YaST > Network Devices > Network Settings

The device should be present (listed), but if not you may need to add manually. The how to link provided previously explains this nicely. If you have problems with yast, post details here.

9

One thing I wanted to check here, before I keep going at it…is that a lot of this article is talking about enabling a wireless card (which I don’t care about right now, I’m just trying to get the eth0 working)…does this matter?

Also I’ve followed all the instructions that I think apply to me on that page and still no luck…

When I try going through to configure the network card through yast using the module ndiswrapper, it doesn’t seem to recognize anything.

…I suppose I’ll go into more detail when I work on it more tomorrow. It’s late now though :frowning:

Edit: I’m wondering if maybe I’ve got the wrong driver installed. Is there a way to remove previous drivers installed with ndiswrapper if they end up being useless?

10

You would need to edit this part of the setup

frednurk@suse110:~> su
Password:
suse110 # ndiswrapper -i /path_to/abcde.inf

delete the driver folder and change the path to the new folder

I’m wondering if maybe I’ve got the wrong driver installed.
Only you know what you installed, unless you provide a url for us to check.

11

Edit: I’m wondering if maybe I’ve got the wrong driver installed. Is there a way to remove previous drivers installed with ndiswrapper if they end up being useless?

You can remove with

ndiswrapper -e <windows_driver_to_be_removed>

12

I just grabbed the file for the windows driver from my motherboard’s website, I haven’t tried this one out to see if anything works out differently.

Motherboard: P45T-A, ECS Black Series motherboard

ECS Web Site

Atheros L1e Gigabit Ethernet Controller Driver

Now, of the files in this download what should I be including in directory with the .inf file?

Is it just the three files in the WindowsXP2003_64 folder?
l1e51x64.sys
l1e51x64.inf
l1e51x64.cat

13

The inf file and sys file are usually the key driver files required for ndiswrapper to operate with. Copy them to a convenient location eg /home/joe/drivers. Then install with:

ndiswrapper -i /home/joe/drivers/l1e51x64.inf

14

Ok, thats what I was doing before. I’ll give the whole deal another try as soon as I get off work.

Thank you all for the help so far :slight_smile:

15

Ok, so I was pretty sure I did everything correctly, but when I try to configure the network adapter in Yast using the module ndiswrapper I get no connection.

16

Well, I was never able to get the ndiswrapper module working. I went ahead and found out how to install the linux driver from source and ended up getting it working that way.

Not sure what I was doing wrong before, but thanks again for all of the help.