On Friday, 23. March 2012. 14.36.26 Akemi Yagi wrote:

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Akemi Yagi amyagi@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 2:16 PM, Marko Vojinovic vvmarko@gmail.com

wrote:

...

...

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):

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?

That is odd. What is your kernel?

uname -mri

That would be the latest regular CentOS 6.2 kernel:

# uname -mri 2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.i686 i686 i386

...

Also, there is some chance that you can find a driver for your wireless USB dongle. That would eliminate the need for ndiswrapper. Please give more detailed info. Output from the lsusb command will be useful.

lsusb didn't provide any nontrivial output (it reported all USB ports as empty). There was something nontrivial going on in /var/log/messages about kernel not being able to recognize the device or something, but I cannot remember it now.

But Ned Slider suggested the kmod-compat-wireless package from elrepo-testing, and after that both /var/log/messages and lsusb reported the proper device (see my response to Ned for details). And it appears to be working fine (so far, I am yet to try to connect with it...).

OK, just found that version of kmod-ndiswrapper would not install in CentOS 6.2 kernels.

I still hope you don't have to use ndiswrapper.

Of course, it is always much better if there are native drivers available. And I'll settle even for the kmod-compat-wireless if it works. The ndiswrapper solution was the last resort, but in the end it seems I won't need it, which is great! :-)

Anyway, thanks for help!

Best, :-) Marko

On Friday, 23. March 2012. 21.36.54 Ned Slider wrote:

On 23/03/12 21:16, Marko Vojinovic wrote:

...

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):

[snip]

...

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?

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...

Right, sorry about that...

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:

I see. Well, I just tried to install it, and it fails again, this time with a similar but different error:

# yum --enablerepo=elrepo-testing install kmod-ndiswrapper [snip regular stuff] Error: Package: kmod-ndiswrapper-1.57-0.1.rc1.el6.elrepo.i686 (elrepo-testing) Requires: ksym(__vmalloc) = 0x5705088a

So it still wants something my kernel doesn't seem to have. :-(

# uname -mri 2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.i686 i686 i386

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

This looks interesting. I just installed it, and it seems to be working! After plugging in the USB dongle, /var/log/messages correctly recognizes the device:

Mar 23 23:06:06 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2 Mar 23 23:06:06 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1286, idProduct=1fab Mar 23 23:06:06 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 Mar 23 23:06:06 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: Product: 54M USB Wireless NIC Mar 23 23:06:06 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Tenda.. Mar 23 23:06:06 CicaMaca kernel: usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

And lsusb now reports:

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1286:1fab Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. 88W8338 [Libertas] 802.11g

Both "Tenda" and "Marvell" are correct. Now I'll try to start NetworkManager and see if I can get it to connect... :-)

Thanks for help!

Best, :-) Marko