Always use the latest version

Everywhere you try something that doesn't work, always make sure you're using the latest version available! They say this in every manual, but you don't know how many people are violating this rule. But of course, one can say that the version that's delivered with your distribution isn't the latest, but that can't be a problem.

Why am I telling this? Seems logical. OK, it's logical, but most people sometimes forget it. And I'm also telling this again because people who are using (K)UBUNTU and having problems with their wireless networking, can find a clue in this. When you follow the (nice explained!) steps in the Ubuntu Wiki about installing ndiswrapper, you just use the version delivered with that version of your distro. When I did this yesterday at the notebook of a friend, seems I installed version 0.2rc2 wich is very old. Off course I ran into trouble.

The big shit is, you don't know you're having trouble. Installing works without complains. Even installing the wirelles WinXP driver works. Loading the module and scanning for networks also works, except one thing: you can't find any networks in your neighborhoud. If you think a bit further and take a look into dmesg, you can find following information:

So, trying the newest version available (version 2.0!) from the ndiswrapper website was the solution. For newbies in that kind of stuff: just make sure you have your kernel sources or headers installed (use your regular tool, synaptic or kynaptic with search keyword "linux" to install), download and unpack (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) the downloaded archive, cd into the directory "ndiswrapper" and use commands "./configure" and "make && make install" and it should be OK. Now you can continue and reinstall your windowsdriver with the normal commands ("ndiswrapper -e driver" to remove one, "ndiswrapper -i driver.inf" to install one). Everything should work fine right now.

For the interested ones: I had those troubles on an Acer Aspire 1510 (1511LMi) with this lspci: