NDISwrapper

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NDISwrapper

ndiswrapper command line
Developer(s) Jan Kiszka, Giridhar Pemmasani, Pontus Fuchs, Wolf Mountain Group
Stable release 1.55 / 2009-06-28; 12 days ago
Operating system Linux on IA-32 and x86-64 architectures only
Type driver wrapper
License GNU GPL
Website http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/ http://www.wolfmountaingroup.org

NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Microsoft Windows drivers for wireless network devices (cards, USB modems, and routers), on Unix-like operating systems, for devices sharing the same architecture only, namely either IA-32 or x86-64. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs, and dynamically linking the driver to this implementation.

Native drivers for Unix and Linux are not available for some wireless network adapters, as manufacturers supply neither drivers nor the information required to write them. NDISwrapper allows Windows drivers available for virtually all adapters to be used under Unix and Linux.

Contents

[edit] Use

NDISwrapper requires at least the ".inf" and the ".sys" files invariably supplied as parts of the Windows driver. For example, if the driver is called "mydriver", with the files mydriver.inf and mydriver.sys and vendorid:productid 0000:0000, then NDISwrapper installs the driver to /etc/ndiswrapper/mydriver/. This directory contains three files:

  • 0000:0000.conf, which contains information extracted from the inf file
  • mydriver.inf (the original inf file)
  • mydriver.sys (the driver file)

[edit] Graphical frontends

Ndisgtk graphical interface

There are graphical frontends to NDISwrapper, such as Ndisgtk and NdisConfig, which allow NDISwrapper to be installed using a graphical user interface rather than console commands.

[edit] Similar programs

DriverLoader is a commercial tool produced by Linuxant for Linux which seems to provide the same functionality as NDISwrapper.

Independently of but roughly simultaneously with the NDISwrapper project, Bill Paul of Wind River Systems developed a similar system, known as Project Evil or The NDISulator, for FreeBSD. It has since been ported to NetBSD. The NDISulator lacks some of the functionality of NDISwrapper, such as USB support.

[edit] Problems

NDISwrapper is useful for a live CD/DVD, but has been reported to cause system crashes and freezes when used for this type of installation. Version 1.52 of 2 February 2008, states "Fixed kernel crash when CONFIG_DEBUG_SHIRQ is enabled". And, certainly, the inability to use the drivers on other architectures such as PowerPC or Alpha is a severe limitation. Also, NDISwrapper does not implement NDIS 6 (Windows Vista version) yet, limiting drivers to Windows XP [1]. While it is not a major problem for the x86 architecture because of the vast popularity of Windows XP x86-32, many vendors choose to make 64-bit drivers only for Windows Vista—which means that Linux systems using the x86-64 architecture are unable to use such networking devices.

An archived version of the project's site and wiki is available.

[edit] Support for recent Linux kernel versions

Since July 2008, ndiswrapper has been forked and is being released and developed in two distinct trees for Linux. The Wolf Mountain Group has been actively maintaining ndiswrapper on more recent Linux kernels such as Linux 2.6.29 and publishes releases which are more recent and support wider compatibility with newer Linux kernels [2].

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper"
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