Netgear Wg511 and its myriad of chipsets
Sometime ago I
sat on my laptop and bent the little part of my PCMCIA network
card. It still works but only in the same room or close to the same
room as the router. So I wanted to fix this as I quite like laying
on the couch downstairs with my laptop.
Yesterday whilst Christmas shopping (yes that's right, it's that
time again) I was in Best Buy and saw one on the shelf. I took it
home and booted with it but unluckily it was not recognized.
lspci told me it was a completely different chipset.
It turns out, depending on the country it was manufactured in,
there are up to
6!! different chipsets. How Linux is
supposed to cope with this, I don't know. It looks like my card,
instead of using the Prism54 driver which I know how to install,
uses
ndiswrapper...
Some vendors do not release specifications of the
hardware or provide a Linux driver for their wireless network
cards. This project implements Windows kernel API and NDIS (Network
Driver Interface Specification) API within Linux kernel. A Windows
driver for wireless network card is then linked to this
implementation so that the driver runs natively, as though it is in
Windows, without binary emulation.
I have no idea whatsoever how to install and configure this, but I
will give it a go. If not, I will return the card and do some
research this time into getting one that runs natively on
linux.