I am having trouble connecting my Netgear wg511 v2 wireless pcmcia card to my laptop. I installed the drivers for it using ndiswrapper but it refuses to power on when plugged in. Wat could be the cause of this problem?
Let’s have a quick look at the chipset and ndiswrapper installation. Can you run this command in a terminal window and return the results here: First run this simple command
su
and then answer the password prompt.
Then run this one:
lspci -nn | egrep "etwork|thernet" ;ndiswrapper -l
You might have to copy/paste that to avoid typos.
lspci -nn | egrep "etwork|thernet" ;ndiswrapper -l
02:08.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82801CAM (ICH3) PRO/100 VM (KM) Ethernet Controller [8086:1038] (rev 41)
mrv8335 : driver installed
I installed the chipset drivers.
Was the card inserted when you ran command lspci, it doesn’t show up.
According to this page: SourceForge.net: Netgear WG511v2 - ndiswrapper
the pciid is 11ab:1faa and the driver that should show from “ndiswrapper -l” is wg5111v2.inf
Can you see that pciid when you run lspci?
Here is the output of lspci with the card inserted.
lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82830 830 Chipset Host Bridge (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82830 830 Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM USB Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 41)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801CAM ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801CAM IDE U100 Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY
02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1988 Allegro-1 (rev 12)
02:04.0 Communication controller: Agere Systems LT WinModem (rev 02)
02:05.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 PC card Cardbus Controller
02:05.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 PC card Cardbus Controller
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801CAM (ICH3) PRO/100 VM (KM) Ethernet Controller (rev 41)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)
It might be better to use the netgear driver files. If you can install them in windows via the exe file, you’ll be able to locate the driver file names in the device manager and then locate them in windows filesystem and extract them to use in openSUSE.
I have read (and successfully tried and done) tat using the chipset drivers work because I do not have the cd.
I’m suggesting trying Netgear’s drivers rather than Marvell’s drivers, have you done that?
How would I go about doing this? The drivers from netgear’s site is in exe format
If you have the correct drivers installed into a windows operating system, e.g. im the same computer as Suse but with a multiboot, then go to windows Device Manager and Right-click the line for the wireless interface and ferret around there and it will tell you the name of the drivers and their path in the windows filesystem. You can retrieve/copy them and use them in Linux for Ndiswrapper.
If you need to install them in a computer to get a hold of them: download the exe file, insert the card, then run the exe file, then goto Device Manager and locate them there.
All it shows on my other machine is the location of the sys file not the inf
Now I located the folder where everything was and now successfully installed the new driver this is what ndiswrapper -l shows
ndiswrapper -l
mrv8335 : driver installed
device (11AB:1FAA) present
wg511v2 : driver installed
device (11AB:1FAA) present
This is what lspci shows
lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82830 830 Chipset Host Bridge (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82830 830 Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM USB Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 41)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801CAM ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801CAM IDE U100 Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY
02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1988 Allegro-1 (rev 12)
02:04.0 Communication controller: Agere Systems LT WinModem (rev 02)
02:05.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 PC card Cardbus Controller
02:05.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 PC card Cardbus Controller
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801CAM (ICH3) PRO/100 VM (KM) Ethernet Controller (rev 41)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)
I feel completely stupid… First time using OpenSuse ever so far I love it completely. I opened yast and let ndiswrapper modprobe the like magic my card lit up thank you for all your help swerdna 
One more thing… I’m having a lot of trouble making ndiswrapper persistent… I’ve read lots of tutorials but I can’t figure this out.
You might have a problem with two drivers installed, try uninstalling one of them, see the ndiswrapper wiki for howto do that