Linux: Installing Windows Vista/7 Wireless Driver for use with ndiswrapper

I booted Linux on my Toshiba Mini NB205 netbook. My Linux system is installed on a USB memory stick and I boot it by plugging it in and using GRUB to load the Linux kernel and a custom initrd image. My Linux system doesn't have network connection yet because it doesn't have the driver for Atheros AR9285 wireless LAN adapter. It can't start X Windows either because I haven't installed the X.org driver package for Intel chipsets yet. Once I set up my wireless connection, I'll update my system, install the Intel video driver, and then set up X Windows.

I tried to install the Windows driver for my Atheros Wireless LAN card which will be loaded by ndiswrapper. First, I had to mount the NTFS partition which is hosting my Windows 7 system.

fdisk -l /dev/sda
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt

I changed my working directory to DriverStore/FileRepository.

cd /mnt/Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileReposity

I tried to find the Vendor ID and Device ID of my wireless LAN card by reading the output of lspci -nn.

lspci -nn

The command above gave me the following output.

03:00.0 Network Controller [0280]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) [168c:002b]

In order to make it easy to find the driver for my wireless LAN card, I created a script file /usr/local/bin/findmydrv.sh with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
FILETYPE=`file $1`
case "$FILETYPE" in
    *UTF-16*)
        iconv -f utf16 -t utf8 $1 | \
        grep -i $2 | \
        grep -iq $3 && \
        echo "Found the driver for your device $2:$3 in $1"
        ;;
    *)
        grep -i $2 $1 | \
        grep -iq $3 && \
        echo "Found the driver for your device $2:$3 in $1"
        ;;
esac

Then, I used the following command.

find -type f -iname \*.inf -exec findmydrv.sh \{\} 168c 002b \;

The previous command will show the location of the .INF file that contains the driver setup information. Once I found the folder that contains the Atheros driver, I went there and installed the driver.

cd netathr.inf_x86_neutral_*
ls -l
ndiswrapper -i netathr.inf

I checked whether the driver was successfully installed by running:

ndiswrapper -l

This displayed the following.

netathr : driver installed
        device (168C:002B) present

I tried the newly installed Windows driver.

modprobe ndiswrapper

Related Posts

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• MSI Driver for Atheros wireless chips: x600_wlan785_x_nb.zip