NDISwrapper

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NDISwrapper
ndiswrapper command line
Developed by	Jan Kiszka, Giridhar Pemmasani, Pontus Fuchs
Latest release	1.53 / May 27, 2008 (2008-05-27); 17 days ago
OS	Unix-like
Genre	driver wrapper
License	GNU GPL
Website	http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

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. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs, and dynamically linking the driver to this implementation.

Native drivers for Unix and Linux are not available for many wireless network adapters, as manufacturers supply neither drivers nor the information required to write them. NDISwrapper allows Windows drivers available for virtually all adapters to be used under Unix and Linux.

1 Use
2 Graphical frontends
3 Similar programs
4 Problems
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Use

NDISwrapper requires at least the ".inf" and the ".sys" files invariably supplied as parts 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 information extracted from the inf file
mydriver.inf (the original inf file)
mydriver.sys (the driver file)

[edit] Graphical frontends

There are graphical frontends to NDISwrapper, such as Ndisgtk and NdisConfig, which allow NDISwrapper to be installed using a graphical user interface rather than console commands.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Problems

NDISwrapper is useful for a live CD/DVD, but has been reported to cause system crashes and freezes. Version 1.52 of 2 February 2008, states "Fixed kernel crash when CONFIG_DEBUG_SHIRQ is enabled".