Who has experience with ndiswrapper?

[struggle4progress]

I'm trying to get a working installion of ubuntu only an old xps t450 -- primarily as a sandbox exercise; the thing ran Windows 98 until I stopped using it several years ago

The exercise, of course, is almost entirely pointless without internet access

Unfortunately, the old box sports an ancient US Robotics winmodem (Rev. A00); I may replace it eventually, but first I want to see whether I can get it working. The linmodem folks' scanModem can identify the modem, though perhaps not correctly -- the scanModem info does really match what's pasted on the physical card -- and scanModem doesn't think it's supported. I haven't found new drivers for it -- the USR drivers site isn't very helpful -- but the old .inf files are available to me from the original install cd

So the first option is an attempt at ndiswrapper. If you have any experience with it, I'd love to hear about that

[struggle4progress]

1. The question may be misguided, and even if it's not the prospects for success may be limited:

I got the old clunker onto the web with a UM150 USB broadband card

And a hearty hi-ho f.u. to winmodems ...

[pokerfan]

2. Yeah, win(dows) modems suck

Although their usage has become more widespread on other operating systems and machines, such as embedded systems and Linux, they are still difficult to use on operating systems other than Windows due to lack of vendor support and lack of a standard device interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

3. "The Eagle has landed" - I have wireless lunux at last

I've occasionally messed around with various linuxes, but never got wireless to work, except by "cheating" (a wireless gaming adapter can fool the computer into thinking it's hardwired into a network).

Most recent failure was with Mint 7 (based on Ubuntu 9.04).

Yesterday I loaded Ubuntu 9.04, again using a gaming adapter. After a few false starts, I got my PCI network card (Belkin Wireless Desktop Network Card, model F5D7000 ver 2000) to work. I am now connected wireless without the gaming adapter.

It required ndiswrapper to load the driver bcmwl5a.inf, extracted from Dell's R74092us.EXE file. After a few bizarre commands and some system administrative magic, it worked!

:thumbsup: