Wireless networking is ideal for home and small office networks avoiding the costs of cabling, patch panels and allowing complete freedom of workstation location. Also, visitors with laptops can easily use your internet connection or share files easily.

In both my home and office I use a combination of wired and wireless networking. Basically, servers are housed together and connected with cables, whilst workstations and laptops are connected with wireless networking.

Unfortunately, wireless networking has been, and remains now, a weak point of Linux systems. Installing drivers for wireless cards, and configuring them once installed often requires more skills or knowledge than it should.

I recently purchased two Netgear WG311 Wireless PCI adaptors for installation in a couple of workstations. Whilst I knew that they were supported in Linux, I did not realise that the process was going to be quite as difficult as it turned out to be (at least on a workstation running Mepis).

When the system failed to recognise the new WG311 I did what all good system administrators did… hit Google hard and quickly found the fundamentals of what was going to be needed to get the network running. In brief, I would be using ndiswrapper which is a rather clever Linux driver which “wraps” the card’s MS Windows driver to make it usable on Linux.

However, in the case of the WG311, there is the added problem that there are 2 drivers which claim the card, but then fail to actually work. So here are the steps required to get the card working…

Preparation

Use ndiswrapper -l to check which Windows drivers are installed…

root@2[~]# ndiswrapper -l airplus : driver installed bcmwl5 : driver installed bcmwl5a : driver installed lsbcmnds : driver installed lsbcmnds6 : driver installed lstinds : driver installed mrv8k51 : driver installed netr33x : driver installed prismnic : driver installed wg311v3 : driver installed device (11AB:1FAA) present wlanuig : driver installed wlipnds : driver installed root@2[~]#

If your results are similar to the above (in as far as the wg311v3 is concerned) you are set to go!

If your results include something like alternative driver available mvr8k in the device xxxx:xxxxx present line you will need to blacklist mrv8k (See below)

If your device has been claimed by a module other than wg311v3 — the most likely culprit will be mrv8k51 — you’ll need to remove the offending driver and install the correct one (see below).

Blacklist mrv8k

This is simple… just add blacklist mrv8k on a line at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Then run depmod -a and reboot

Remove the mrv8k51 driver

ndiswrapper -r mrv8k51

Installing the wg311v3 driver

See this link for detailed instructions.