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Note: there’s been a lot of traffic to this page, and just out of interest, I’d like to know if this piece of advice has actually helped anyone out, so if it has aided you in your quest to wireless connectivity, has led you through yet another wild goose-chase, or is flawed in any manner or form, please leave a comment and I’ll make adjustments as required.

I was determined to get my wireless card up and running – There are reports out there that belkin f5d6001 cards have worked without incident for others, so I should be able to figure out WHY there are so many incidents that prevent me from running mine.

After trawlling through the internet I find out about ndiswrapper. I install ndiswrapper and as suggested use the drivers provided with my card. “belkin f5d6001″ – the driver gives you enough hope in a sense that it detects your network card, but does not detect anything else (no access points, NOTHING! but you can attempt to configure it).

After days of trying this, that and other different ways of setting up wireless configurations, I came across some post saying that you could also use rtl8180 windows drivers with ndiswrapper to make things work. I was desperate so I dug a little deeper remembering that I had reviewed the blacklist and found a bug report about Linux r818x drivers. This confirmed some things for me and so I downloaded the windows driver from realtek website.

Here are the following steps I did to make things happen:

Download the driver for Windows XP.
If you have not done so already, install ndiswrapper-1.9
Unzip the downloaded driver and install it using ndiswrapper

Here’s a line for line as to what I did:

Install ndiswrapper and set it up so that your belkin f5d6001 uses the Windows XP net8180 driver

$ sudo aptitude install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper #add ndiswrapper module to linux kernel.
$ sudo ndiswrapper -i
 /NET8180.INF # install windows driver (net8180)
$ sudo ndiswrapper -d 1799:6001 net8180 #use installed driver (net8180) for device id (1799:6001)

Configure your /etc/network/interfaces either through vim if you feel like hacking away in command line. Here’s what my /etc/network/interfaces file is structured (keep in mind that yours will be different, for instance, I am using a static ip address for more information, run “man interfaces”):

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
address 127.0.0.1
netmask 255.0.0.0

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
wireless-essid {your ess id}
address 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway {your gateway}
mode Managed
ap {mac address of your Access point - don't know if this is essential however.}
wireless-key {your encrypted wireless key}

Or alternatively, if you are using Kubuntu, you can use knetworkmanager by going to the K menu > Internet > KnetworkManger (if it’s not already launched). This will add a system tray icon for you.

Right click on the system tray icon and click "manual configuration".
This loads up KnetworkManager which prompts you for a password
Enter your password - it will then load up the available network interfaces screen.
Right click on your wireless network card and click "configure interface"
Fill in the details, including the advanced details.

An additional note for ESSID

I found out a few hours of disconnection and desperate retracing of steps. The bug mentioned below has been fixed in later updates of the (k)ubuntu distro (I’ve enabled updates from the proposed/pre release repository). To my knowledge this bug has been fixed, but if you’ve followed everything to the letter and still not getting the desired results, then I guess you could give the following a shot

Apparently, there is a bug somewhere which cuts off the last character of an ESSID. Obviously, the workaround for this is to add an extra character at the end of the ESS ID. So for instance if my ESSID is “VillarDavid”, I would need to enter “VillarDavidD”. The last character is cut off.

Click on the "Routes" tab and enter the ip address of your Access Point as your Default Gateway IP (or whatever IP address your default gateway is).
Click apply, click ok.

Restart your computer.

If you log on and find that your wireless isn’t connected, then try running the following:

$ sudo ifdown wlan0 #or whatever your wireless card's interface id is

If this works and you don’t want to have to do this every time you restart your computer, then the pre-up directive can be used to do this automatically for you.

I had to add the following lines to my interface entry for wlan0 in /etc/network/interfaces

pre-up ifup wlan0
pre-up ifdown wlan0

So my interfaces entry looks like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
address 127.0.0.1
netmask 255.0.0.0

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
pre-up ifup wlan0
pre-up ifdown wlan0
wireless-essid {your ess id}
address 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway {gateway address}
mode Managed
ap {mac address of your access point}
wireless-key {your encrypted wireless key}

And there you have it – now belkin f5d6001 “just-works”, “out of the box”, “hassle free” – yeah right. To conclude, the main culprit were the drivers. You SHOULD NOT use the windows drivers provided by belkin with your wireless card but instead download the rtl8180 driver from the realtek website. Once you get over this hurdle, you the other thing that makes the whole thing so “hacky” for me is that I needed to run an ifdown/ifup cycle to get it to work. This reminnds me of Commodore 64 days when I had to flip my cassette drive upside down so it would load “Ghostbusters” properly – The one that says “Ghostbusters mwahahahahaha” everytime you press the spacebar – hmmmm those were the days.

From: Fixed my Feisty Fawn Wireless Mess
See also: Linux RT818X driver crashes 2.6.20.x kernel

Additional notes and Corrections

If you can ping your router, but cannot access web sites. Then you’ve probably left out your DNS settings. Usually, it is the IP address of your Wireless router.

Easiest way to do this in gnome is to go to administration >> networking.
To do this in kde go to K >> System Settings >> network settings >> click administrator mode and enter password >> click on domain name system >> add your DNS server.

Related posts:

1. The Feisty Fawn Upgrade Misadventure
2. Linux RT818X driver crashes 2.6.20.x kernel

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