[CentOS] Ndiswrapper refuses to install?

[Ned Slider]

On 23/03/12 21:16, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
>
> Hi everyone! :-)
>
> I have a problem with making a wireless USB dongle work under CentOS 6. The
> dongle is known to not work natively under Linux and last time I used it (cca
> 3 years ago) I managed to get it working using ndiswrapper.
>
> This time I was hoping to make it work again in the same way. But the "yum
> install kmod-ndiswrapper" reports the following (among other regular stuff):
>
> Error: Package: kmod-ndiswrapper-1.56-1.el6.elrepo.i686 (elrepo)
>             Requires: kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0xb3994c7a
>             Installed: kernel-2.6.32-220.2.1.el6.i686 (@updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Installed: kernel-2.6.32-220.4.2.el6.i686 (@updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Installed: kernel-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.i686 (@updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-2.6.32-220.el6.i686 (base)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-2.6.32-220.4.1.el6.i686 (updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-debug-2.6.32-220.el6.i686 (base)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-debug-2.6.32-220.2.1.el6.i686 (updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-debug-2.6.32-220.4.1.el6.i686 (updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-debug-2.6.32-220.4.2.el6.i686 (updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>             Available: kernel-debug-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.i686 (updates)
>                 kernel(per_cpu__kstat) = 0x0954e8e2
>
> And yum refuses to install it. I've never seen this kind of report by yum.
> What's going on here? And more importantly, how do I install kmod-ndiswrapper
> on my up-to-date CentOS 6.2?
>
> Best, :-)
> Marko
>

Hi MarKo,

First up, this is really the wrong list. kmod-ndiswrapper is from the 
elrepo repository so you should really report end user issues there, not 
here on the CentOS mailing list. But since we are here...

This is a known issue - kmod-ndiswrapper fails on RHEL-6.2 due to kABI 
breakage. We tried rebuilding 1.56 against the 6.2 kernel but the code 
fails to compile. The best we could do was to update to 1.57-rc1 
(kmod-ndiswrapper-1.57-0.1.rc1.el6.elrepo.i686.rpm) which was the latest 
release at the time. This package has been in the testing repo since the 
release of RHEL-6.2 and has yet to receive any feedback - please feel 
free to be the first:

http://elrepo.org/linux/testing/el6/

However, have you considered using a native Linux driver for your 
wireless? What chipset is it? The elrepo project has just released 
kmod-compat-wireless for el6 which is a backport of the kernel-3.3 
wireless stack supporting many wireless devices.

http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-compat-wireless

Hope that helps.