Trying to get ndiswrapper working in Wolvix Hunter and Debian Lenny

I ran into trouble in Debian Lenny while trying to use ndiswrapper to get my Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB WiFi adapter to work. The modprobe ndiswrapper line at a root prompt wouldn't load.

So I tried Wolvix Hunter, after I su to root and doing the Ubuntu instructions, removing sudo as necessary.

It seemed to work, but the ndiswrapper module wouldn't load after rebooting. I checked /etc/modules, and the line ndiswrapper was in there.

Googling ndiswrapper and Debian helped a bit, and I'll have to take another look before I solve the problem.

But for Wolvix, I found the answer in the Ndiswrapper page on Sourceforge. On the installation page on the wiki:

Once everything works fine you can write the correct modprobe settings to load ndiswrapper automatically when the wlan0 interface is used, by running ndiswrapper -m Note that this doesn’t automatically load ndiswrapper module at boot time. If you want the module to be loaded automatically at boot time, you should configure your module setup, which depends on the distribution. Most distributions will load all modules listed in /etc/modules at boot time. Mandrake 10.x uses /etc/modprobe.preload. For them, you can add a line ndiswrapper in /etc/modules. For Fedora Core5, add a line alias wlan0 ndiswrapper in /etc/modprobe.conf.

If this does not work, instead add a line modprobe ndiswrapper in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

I did the latter, adding modprobe ndiswrapper to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. That worked.

Now I need a live WiFi connection to try this out. Another trip to the library (where I was yesterday testing the wireless in the $15 Laptop, which has a plug-and-play Orinoco WaveLAN Silver card (I can't recommend the Orinoco cards highly enough -- this one works on both my old Mac (Powerbook 1400), as well as in every Linux I've tried and in Windows. In Linux and Windows, it's plug-and-play. (I had to install software to get it to work on the Mac, but that's normal for a 1996 Powerbook that was created well before WiFi.)

Anyhow, I'm far enough along in Wolvix and Ubuntu with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028. I'd rather have the AWLL3026, which is autodetected by Ubuntu, I've heard, but if this works, I won't be complaining too much.

Note: While I managed to get Wolvix to recognize the Airlink USB WiFi adapter, I couldn't connect to a network. I'm going to replace Wolvix with Ubuntu and see if that helps.