Third time unlucky

Q I recently took the leap of faith and decided to stop using Live CDs and install Hardy Heron on a standalone system. Hardy is brilliant but as a freshie to Linux I am at a loss as to how to share my internet connection between my one desktop running Win XP Service Pack 3 and the other desktop running Hardy 8.04. I have a Sky Netgear wireless router that comes as standard on Sky Broadband the Netgear DG834GT-SKUKS. The Linux desktop has a Wireless-G PCI Wireless Adaptor WG311 v3. I have done a search on the internet to no avail as some of the help out there is not easy for freshies to understand. Please help me before I'm sucked back to the dark side by uninstalling Ubuntu and installing XP on the second machine, which I am dreading.

A There are three versions of the WG311 card, using completely different chipsets. The first two are supported by the MadWifi and ACX drivers respectively. The v3 card uses the Marvel chipset, for which there is no useful driver right now. This means you have to use NdisWrapper, which in turn uses the Windows drivers supplied with the card. Install NdisWrapper through the Synaptic package manager, then copy the driver files from the CD to your home directory. The three files you need are, WG311v3.INF, WG311v3.sys and WG311v3XP.sys. If these are not available on the CD in anything but a Windows installer file (or you no longer have the CD), you can download them from www.jimbo7.com/wiki/files/good_WG311v3-driver.tgz. If that file is no longer available, Google for "WG311v3 linux wiki" - this is a set of instructions for Debian but the driver files are good. Once you have the files, open a terminal and run

sudo ndiswrapper -i /WG311v3.INF

to install and register the driver with NdisWrapper, then test that the module loads and detects your wireless card with

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo ifconfig -a

The first command should produce no output, and the second should show your wireless interface, wlan0. Now edit /etc/modules as root with

sudo gedit /etc/modules

and add ndiswrapper on a separate line at the end of the file. This loads the driver each time you boot, so your wireless card is available. Now you can set up the wireless connection using the standard Ubuntu program, System > Administration > Network.

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