I’ve installed Mandriva (2006) Linux on my computer to dual boot with Windows XP. I have an Acer Travelmate 2700 laptop, with an inbuilt wireless network card. The card is picked up fine by Windows, but Mandriva won’t find it, however, the Mandriva disks contain the ndiswrapper .rpm which I’ve installed.
I’ve been able to work out that my card, only listed as an “Acer wireless networking card” on the Acer website is supported by ndiswrapper by running lspci and looking at other people’s successes on the ndiswrapper website, so there should be no problem there.
I download the latest version of the Windows driver to my computer and unzip the archive. I then follow exactly these instructions for attempting to install the driver (the automatic installation through Mandriva Control Panel (or whatever it is called) does not work, it keeps complaining that it cannot find the ndiswrapper interface after specifying which .inf file to use. Everything goes smoothly until I try to do modprobe ndiswrapper, to which modprobe complains that ndiswrapper cannot be found. The driver seems to be installed correctly by ndiswrapper, as there is a folder under /etc/ndiswrapper/ with the driver name containing .conf and .inf files as expected, and ndiswrapper -l states that the driver is loaded and the hardware is present.
What is causing this? I’m a bit of a novice with kernel modules and this is the first time I’ve used modprobe. Does anyone have any experience with ndiswrapper? How can I fix it?
Thanks