Wireless problem with successful driver installation via ndiswrapper

Hello all,
I’ve been playing around with Opensuse for a while and I think i’m close to getting my wireless card to work. Its a Neatgear N300 (WN311B) on a Inspirion 530. I downloaded and installed ndiswrapper, obtained the driver files from the windows partition and loaded them in Opensuse. I think it installed correctly cause it didn’t give any error messages and when I run ndiswrapper -l I get the following

Wn311b: driver installed
device (14E4:9329) Present(alternate driver: ssb)

I also ran ndiswrapper -m

however when I run ifconfig wlan0 up I get

unknown interface: No such device

and wlan0 doesnt show up with ifconfig -a.

I’m not sure what I’m missing and was wondering if anyone had any thoughts. Any help would be appreciated

Can you post you’re iwconfig?

Refer to this thread. I don’t know if ndiswrapper will work or not but that should be the last resort.

Problem with Netgear WN311 PCI card

I followed the thread to the following broadcom website

Broadcom.com - 802.11 Linux STA driver

After reading the .txt file I downloaded the 64bit version because it corresponds to my machine’s architecture. After un taring the tarball I used the “make” command per the instructions and received the following error.

KBUILD_NOPEDANTIC=1 make -C /lib/modules/uname -r/build M=pwd
make: *** /lib/modules/2.6.31.14-0.2-desktop/build: No such file or directory. Stop.
make: *** [all] Error 2

This error was mentioned in the .txt file. I then tried googling it and downloaded the following rpm file.

linux-2.6.36.tar.bz2 (kernel.org)

after untaring and making it, it did not solve my problem. I then downloaded the following file and tried to install it.

kernel-desktop-devel-2.6.36-18.1.x86_64.rpm (rpmfind.net).

I then received the following error

kernel-devel = 2.6.36-18 is needed by kernel-desktop-devel-2.6.36-18.1.x86_64

I could not find that kernel. I then tried YAST in which I downloaded every package found when searching kernel-devel and kernel-desktop-devel. When doing that 2.6.31.14-0.1 was found and not 2.6.31.14-0.2. So nothing helped. If I could get that kernel I might be in business but I’m done with the wild goose chase. If anyones got a link where I can get it I’d appreciate it.

also my iwconfig is as follows:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

Thanks for the help thus far.

The driver is in the packman repository.
PackMan :: Package details for broadcom-wl
It’s best to add the repository so it doesn’t break every time you update the kernel.

apparently there is the file /lib/modules/2.6.31.14-0.2-desktop folder, there just isn’t a “build” folder in it like there are in folders of the other releases in the same directory. How do I get that “build” directory?

Also I’m aware the driver is out there. It lists it in the README file. My trouble is with the necessary modules. I have no idea whats going on at this level.

I’m also not sure how to add a repository like Pacman. I’m aware of the command line commands and how to do it through yast. My problem is I don’t know what URL to put. I was hoping I could copy and paste a link but I don’t know which one or if that’s even the case.

Go to the menu and then Yast > Software Repositories > Add > Community Repositories > next >Select “Packman Repository” > click ok

At that point you should be able to search in yast’s software management for broadcom-wl.
Or you can just use “sudo zypper in broadcom-wl” from the command line.

You don’t need to build anything. The driver is already packaged for you in the packman repository.