Comprehensive ndiswrapper troubleshooting guide

[tmulcahy]

Thanks Chris,
I will try version 2.1 of the driver and let you know if it succeeds, thanks again.
Regards,Tom

Hi Chris,
No luck with the 2.1 driver I'm afraid.. if any of the other solutions work I will let you know. Thanks for your help

Tom

[axe87]

axe87: first, isn't the 2.6.25 kernel outdated now? Stable Intrepid should be using 2.6.27. Are you still running Intrepid alpha or something, and if so can you upgrade to the stable release?

pytheas22,

I've just updated to Intrepid and thought I was on the latest kernel. When I do another update it says the system is up to date. Any hints on how I can get on to the stable release, as it seems I'm not. Might as well sort this out first.

P.S. The reason for using ndiswrapper; I was using it before as it was giving better performance with my WiFi chipset.

[pytheas22]

Tom: sorry to hear that. If you get time, you might try compiling ndiswrapper from source or upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10.

By the way, how consistent is the behavior you experience? Does your connection always break at the same point during a download, and if so, how long can you download for before it crashes? And it only breaks during long downloads, right, not during normal surfing or shorter (<10 megabyte for example) downloads? What kind of speeds are you downloading at when it crashes (you can of course press control-Y in Firefox and it will show you current downloads and their speeds)? If you download a large file at a slow speed (because it's hosted by a slow server), does it still break?

It might be possible to throttle download speed as a way to prevent the interface from crashing during long downloads...you wouldn't be able to download at full speed, but at least the connection wouldn't die.

axe87: perhaps you upgraded but for some reason are still booting into an older kernel. What is the output of:

uname -a
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

[axe87]

pytheas22

Thanks that was the hint I needed. Booted now on the 2.6.27 kernel and able to get ndiswrapper running without needing to recompile.

[tmulcahy]

Tom: sorry to hear that. If you get time, you might try compiling ndiswrapper from source or upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10.

By the way, how consistent is the behavior you experience? Does your connection always break at the same point during a download, and if so, how long can you download for before it crashes? And it only breaks during long downloads, right, not during normal surfing or shorter (<10 megabyte for example) downloads? What kind of speeds are you downloading at when it crashes (you can of course press control-Y in Firefox and it will show you current downloads and their speeds)? If you download a large file at a slow speed (because it's hosted by a slow server), does it still break?

It might be possible to throttle download speed as a way to prevent the interface from crashing during long downloads...you wouldn't be able to download at full speed, but at least the connection wouldn't die.

Chris,
I need to run a cable from my router to download 8.10, might be able to do that today. Regarding the consistency of the connection behaviour, One night I managed to download a file of 537mb, whereas other nights the connection failed well before that much data had been downloaded.

I have been routinely making 500kB/s from my connection which is pretty much bang on the money for a 4mb/s dsl.
Speed throttling is something I had thought about, however I don't know how to go about it.. My router does not support it either. Any suggestions?
Cheers, Tom

[pytheas22]

There's a utility called trickle that should be able to throttle bandwidth. You can install it with:

sudo apt-get install trickle

To use it, run a command like:

trickle -s -d [max download speed, in Kb/s] -u [max upload] [executable to run]

So if you wanted to start Firefox and cap downloads and uploads at 10 Kb/s, you would type:

trickle -s -d 10 -u 10 firefox

Make sure you've closed all running instances of Firefox (or typed 'killall firefox') before starting a new Firefox session through trickle; otherwise trickle won't work.

I'd give this a shot. If you cap your download speeds, does the connection still crash? If this works, we can figure out how to make Firefox always run through trickle in a more user-friendly way (i.e. without you having to launch it through a terminal).

[kinyua]

My Toshiba laptop has a broken wifi i use a usb adapter would it be any easier to configure it using ndiswrapper?I jus wanna know before I try Ubuntu on it!

Thanks in advance!

[pytheas22]

kinyua: ndiswrapper would almost certainly be one way to get your card working, but depending on which chipset is in the card, there may be easier/better ways (i.e. if there's a native Linux driver available, it's usually better to go that route). If you post the output of this command (with the card plugged in), I'll look it up and try to find instructions for you on getting it working:

lsusb

[ryan!]

ryan@ryan-desktop:~$ ndiswrapper -l
athfmwdl : driver installed
ryan@ryan-desktop:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:c016 Logitech, Inc. M-UV69a/HP M-UV96 Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 413c:2003 Dell Computer Corp. Keyboard
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1385:4250 Netgear, Inc WG111T
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
ryan@ryan-desktop:~$ lshw -C Network
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
*-network
description: Ethernet interface
product: 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller
vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: eth0
version: 14
serial: 00:e0:61:09:d3:e9
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=sky2 driverversion=1.22 firmware=N/A latency=0 module=sky2 multicast=yes
*-network DISABLED
description: Ethernet interface
physical id: 1
logical name: pan0
serial: a6:8f:cd:97:f1:7e
capabilities: ethernet physical
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=bridge driverversion=2.3 firmware=N/A multicast=yes




HELP........PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!

[pytheas22]

ryan!: according to the database, your card should be supported by the driver available here. However, the database notes that there are two .inf files contained there--athfmwdl and wg111t--and that both need to be installed in order for ndiswrapper to work. It looks like you only have athfmwdl installed, not wg111t too. Please try installing wg111t by cd'ing into the directory where it's located and typing:

sudo ndiswrapper -i wg111t.inf

Then reboot. If things still don't work after a reboot, please post the output of:

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