Jump to content

NDISwrapper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by HDCase (talk | contribs) at 06:09, 23 February 2008 (→‎Problems). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

NdisWrapper
Developer(s)Jan Kiszka, Giridhar Pemmasani, Pontus Fuchs
Stable release
Operating systemUnix-like
Typedriver wrapper
LicenseGNU GPL
WebsiteOfficial website

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.

This is important, because many vendors of wireless cards do not release Linux supported drivers for the cards, nor information about how to write a driver. Ndiswrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs, and dynamically linking the driver to this implementation.

Use

Ndiswrapper requires at least the ".inf" and the ".sys" files 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 informations extracted from the inf file
  • mydriver.inf (the original inf file)
  • mydriver.sys (the driver file)

Graphical frontends

There are graphical frontends to NdisWrapper, such as Ndisgtk and NdisConfig, which allow NdisWrapper to be installed using only a graphical user interface.

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, but not OpenBSD, due to the latter's anti-binary blob policy. The NDISulator lacks some of the functionality of NdisWrapper, such as USB support.

Problems

Ndiswrapper is useful for a live CD/DVD, but has been reported to cause system crashes and freezes.

See also

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NDISwrapper&oldid=193440876"