Comprehensive ndiswrapper troubleshooting guide

[pytheas22]

dngen: thanks for trying that driver. Your dmesg output finally does not report any errors, which is a good sign. Are you still unable to connect even if you disable encryption on your router? (And by the way, I may have asked you this already, but you're positive you don't have MAC address filtering enabled on your router, correct?)

chrisjabroni: the "lshw -C Network" command should detect your wireless card, assuming it is properly configured, regardless of whether the card is a PCI or USB device. Since yours wasn't mentioned, it means there's a problem with the configuration.

Generally the "Unknown symbol" error occurs because ndiswrapper can't understand the Windows driver that you loaded into it. It seems to happen especially often with drivers for more recent versions of Windows, like Vista and 7. I would try a different, earlier version of the Windows driver; hopefully you will be able to find one which doesn't produce error messages in the dmesg output.

Compiling ndiswrapper from source is unlikely to change anything until you find a Windows driver that doesn't produce the "Unknown symbol" errors, so I would suggest trying to overcome first, and hopefully it will solve all of your problems.

If you still can't get it, it would be helpful also to know the PCI ID of your device so I can do some googling about it.

[chrisjabroni]

I've tried all the drivers available for this adapter, i'm having no luck

Specifically its the D-link Rangebooster G (WUA 2340)

Thank you for your help!

[pytheas22]

chrisjabroni: in addition to the device name, it would be useful to know the PCI ID of the card. If you could please post the output of the command "lsusb" when it's plugged in, that would be great. Thanks!

[chrisjabroni]

I'm sorry,

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 07d1:3108 D-Link System predator Bootloader Download
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

I also tried re-installing ndiswrapper, and now when i input "sudo ndiswrapper -l" it just hangs in terminal

[pytheas22]

chrisjabroni: hmmm, I don't see any wireless USB device listed in your "lsusb" output at all, which could mean that you have a hardware problem. lsusb should always mention the device, regardless of whether there's a driver available for it.

Are you positive that the wireless card actually works? Have you tried it on another computer? And are you able to use other USB devices on your Ubuntu computer?

If it is a hardware issue, there may be some information provided by the command:

dmesg | tail -25

a few minutes after you plug in the wireless card.

[dngen]

dngen: thanks for trying that driver. Your dmesg output finally does not report any errors, which is a good sign. Are you still unable to connect even if you disable encryption on your router? (And by the way, I may have asked you this already, but you're positive you don't have MAC address filtering enabled on your router, correct?)

MAC address filtering on my router is turned off. I checked and it's never been on.

When I disabled the security, the driver worked!! But it only loaded up two websites (that weren't cached on my laptop). Then after about 10 seconds, it wasn't loading youtube or running speedtest.net

EDIT:
After testing it several times, the issue is still the same.
If the WPA security is removed on my router, I can connect for a few seconds but then it will stop working.

When I login, I get a message saying "Login Keyring" isn't activated or something and must input my password. Could that be a problem?
And it seems like the wireless doesn't refresh/scan when new networks are around it.

[pytheas22]

dngen: well, it's certainly good that you can get connected with wireless turned off, even if briefly. That helps narrow down the possible causes of the issue. Unfortunately, the keyring bit is unrelated to the disconnects; it just pops up every time you log in so that your passwords will become available to the system.

It would be helpful to see the output of the commands:

dmesg | tail -25
dmesg | grep -e wlan -e ndis

immediately after you get disconnected. With any luck, that will provide some useful clues as to what exactly is going wrong.

I also wonder if you'd now have better connection stability using wicd instead of NetworkManager. You probably won't because I suspect the issue has to do with the driver itself rather than the connection manager, but it would be worth a try.

[chrisjabroni]

chrisjabroni: hmmm, I don't see any wireless USB device listed in your "lsusb" output at all, which could mean that you have a hardware problem. lsusb should always mention the device, regardless of whether there's a driver available for it.

Are you positive that the wireless card actually works? Have you tried it on another computer? And are you able to use other USB devices on your Ubuntu computer?

If it is a hardware issue, there may be some information provided by the command:

dmesg | tail -25

a few minutes after you plug in the wireless card.

Yes I know this device works because on this computer I had it running win7 and ubuntu and on win7 it worked fine. (I do know it works on other devices as well)

In lsusb, does it not show the device here:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 07d1:3108 D-Link System predator Bootloader Download

and I ran the other command:

chris@chris-system:~$ dmesg | tail -25
[   88.610224] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.610314] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.610325] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.610600] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.610756] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.610768] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.610785] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.610878] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.610889] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.610906] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.610996] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611007] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611023] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.611114] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611126] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611143] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.611270] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611283] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611300] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.611402] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611414] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.611430] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)
[   88.612914] ACPI Error (psargs-0359): [\_SB_.PCI0.USB0] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.612929] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_GPE._L0E] (Node f701dc18), AE_NOT_FOUND
[   88.612956] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, while evaluating GPE method [_L0E] (20100428/evgpe-395)

[pytheas22]

chrisjabroni: sorry, my mistake. I thought the "System predator Bootloader Download" was not a wireless card because that description doesn't sound like one, plus when I googled the PCI ID of the device only one loan post came up. But after more googling, it appears that there are several wireless cards out there (not all with your exact PCI ID) which are described in lsusb as "System predator Bootloader Download." Unfortunately, however, all of them seem to have issues with ndiswrapper; I couldn't find any posts where someone successfully gets the device working.

But we can still try. Based on your dmesg output, it actually does not look like the ndiswrapper is even loading at all, so that would be at least part of the problem. You can load it manually by typing:

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

After that, does a wireless device become visible in NetworkManager? If not, what is the output at this point of:

dmesg | grep -e ndis -e wlan
lshw -C Network
ndiswrapper -l

You seem to have a lot of weird spam in dmesg related to ACPI issues as well, but I don't think that is why ndiswrapper isn't working.

[chrisjabroni]

chris@chris-system:~$ dmesg |grep -e ndis -e wlan
[   82.844812] ndiswrapper version 1.56 loaded (smp=yes, preempt=no)
[   83.331762] ndiswrapper (load_wrap_driver:108): couldn't load driver neta5agu; check system log for messages from 'loadndisdriver'
[   83.331833] usbcore: registered new interface driver ndiswrapper

Right before this loads it says:

PCI (SYS)

Am i supposed to do anything at that point?
This is the output

chris@chris-system:~$ lshw -C network
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
*-network               
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet
       vendor: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]
       physical id: 4
       bus info: pci@0000:00:04.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 91
       serial: 00:0c:6e:ec:eb:6d
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=sis900 driverversion=v1.08.10 Apr. 2 2006 latency=32 maxlatency=11 mingnt=52 multicast=yes
       resources: irq:19 ioport:8800(size=256) memory:d5000000-d5000fff memory:dfee0000-dfefffff
chris@chris-system:~$ ndiswrapper -l
neta5agu : driver installed
	device (07D1:3A08) present
chris@chris-system:~$

Sorry if this sounds like a really dumb question, but what are ACPI? And is there anything I can do to rid the issues? Or is that a totally separate issue all by itself?