Configuring a Linksys PCMCIA WPC11 v4 in Linux

Last year a friend of mine (aka. the black) brought to me, from the US, a wireless kit consisting of a Linksys AP and a WPC11 v4 PCMCIA card. Since I've some free time I decided to spend the night configuring my wifi card in a laptop with 2.6.10.

As you probably known the guys at Linksys have made a (stupid bastards) change in the WPC11 card. The card is now based on Realtek 8180 chipset and the problem is that there are not OSS drivers for this chipset (the only drivers available are distributed in binary form and for 2.4 kernels).

I am a .*BSD fan so in my laptops I used to run FreeBSD (or OpenBSD). With FreeBSD you can solve this problem with an NDIS simulator called Project Evil. Project Evil is an NDIS wrapper that allows users to run Windows binary drivers on FreeBSD/x86. But since I have use the card on Linux I need to use Ndiswrapper. Steps:

1. Download ndiswrapper
2. # make install
3. # ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.10 /lib/modules/2.6.10/build
4. Visit the list of known to work drivers here, and download this if you have a WPC11 v4.
   
5. # ndiswrapper -i NET8180.INF
6. # modprobe ndiswrapper
7. Post to your blog using wifi (optional)
   

That's all my friends, enjoy and Merry Christmas.