Alright, after trying Knoppix for a while, I decided I liked Linux enough to install the Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon distro on my old Windows 2000 machine. I must say, the installation was a pain, but that's because I messed up. First, during the installation I lost power, so I had to start all over again. But when I tried a reinstall (after manually formatting the drive via fdisk) my installation would fault at about 43%. I searched high and low, and after some time and a lot of frustration I found out that I had to fix the Master Boot Record (MBR) or simply delete it. This would fix my problems. Unfortunately, one option was to use
fdisk /mbr which didn't help. Yet, the second option was to overwrite the MBR with a new one via
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=2. After, that everything went smoothly. My wireless card was recognized by the OS and the only thing I had to do was to set up wpa_supplicant. I used the package manager to download the software I use even under Windows as open source.
Another snag I hit was forcing dhcp to assign an IP to my card automatically. Under Knoppix I used
pump -i wlan0, but for Kubuntu I needed
dhclient wlan0 (coincidentally when I was using Backtrack 2.0 to asses my network encryption it required
dhcpcd wlan0).
Using Backtrack though,
dhcpcd kept hanging so I used
killall and restart the module. Then, I closed the shell in which wpa_supplicant was running and away goes my network. Since I am no Linux whiz, I decided to start from scratch. I removed ndiswrapper and uninstalled the driver:
modprobe -r ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -r bcmwl5 This way I could install the driver again. Phew!
