ndiswrapper does not work with Network Manager

If the adapter is configured in /etc/network/interfaces, network manager won't "see" it. Remove any configurations from the gnome networking app.

Be aware that if you connect to an unencrypted wifi network, you'll likely encounter bug 42504.

I'm using a rt2500 pcmcia card and its windows-driver via ndiswrapper on dapper. Network-Manager can find networks, but doesn't connect. The problem is wpa_supplicant and its ndiswrapper-backend, which doesn't work for me. BUT the wext backend works fine. There is a workaround in

src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c
if (!strcmp (kernel_driver, "ath_pci"))
         wpa_driver = "madwifi";
 else if (!strcmp (kernel_driver, "ndiswrapper"))
         wpa_driver = "ndiswrapper";
 else
         wpa_driver = "wext";

I removed the ndiswrapper-workaround there and now it works just fine.

BTW: Installing the source with "apt-src network-manager", the workaround isn't applied (it's in src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c.orig). I removed the lines from src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c.orig and copied it over to src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c and build a package.

The lines are added at part of 60-rml-wpa-workarounds.patch. This patch also detects the madwifi ath_pci driver and attempts towork arround the issue there. Since ndiswrapper, at least, now correctly implements wext (AFAIK) the special case should no longer be needed.

I will attempt to confirm this over the next few days on my test network.

i have had a couple of bugs which i have posted on other pages but ndiswrapper + bcmwl5 works on my
laptop.

The ndiswrapper in dapper still needs the special cases wo work properly with wpasupplicant. What I expect Olaf is seeing is bug 42504 (if his networks aren't wep or wpa encrypted).

Well, my network is not encrypted but when using WEXT with wpa_supplicant (instead of it's ndiswrapper driver) I can connect to unencrypted networks without any problems.

BUT one thing is not working - link quality is always 100%.

Try the packages I posted in bug 42504 and see if that allows for conection.

Yes, it seems to work fine with my unencrypted networks.

For me too, thanks a lot!

What's the status on this bug? Ndiswrapper and rt61 have been broken for me since Dapper came out, and I haven't been sure what to do about it. Downgrading to 0.5.1 works, but I can't be going around recommending Ubuntu to people and then telling them they have to downgrade such and such a package if they want decent wireless support. Today I tried using the ndiswrapper from edgy, and it's also broken. I'm really anxious to see something done about this issue.

This problem affects all wireless drivers I have tested running using ndiswrapper in edgy, removing the special case for ndiswrapper and allowing it to use Wireless extentions directly fixes this problem for all the systems I have tested it on. This would seem to be a simple two-line change to fix, and would allow my network cards, which worked with network-manager to work with edgy as well.

Changes:
 network-manager (0.6.3-2ubuntu6) edgy; urgency=low
 .
   * ndiswrapper uses the stock wext driver now, so remove that bit of the
     10-rml-wpa-workarounds.patch. Adjust
     11-j-hostap-supplicant-driver.patch appropriately. Malone: #46136

After adding a comment to another bug I saw that it was marked as a duplicate of this one, so here it goes.

After reading through all the comments I think that my problem may be something else, but it could also be related to some fix.
Connecting my HP nx6110 (Broadcom 4318 rev2) to my router using WPA worked in Dapper and Edgy, but no longer in Feisty, all the while using ndiswrapper and knetworkamanger. Changing the encryption to WEP "solves" the issue. This seems similar to bug 86039.