Ubuntu - ndiswrapper

I'm having a problem I think most people have while trying to get a USB internet adapter to work in Linux - it doesn't.

I'm a Linux noob; I just installed Ubuntu last night, and aside from a brief 48-hour encounter with Mandrake, it's the only Linux release I've ever installed. So when I ask for help, try to be as gentle as possible.

I'll try to make this brief: I have a Netgear WG111T wireless internet dongle. I installed Ubuntu, loaded ndiswrapper from the package, downloaded the drivers associated with adapter, extracted the .inf, .bin, and .sys files into my home directory, and installed the correct .inf file using:

sudo ndiswrapper -i /home/kn/athfmwdl.inf

(kn being my computer name and athfmwdl being the driver). I initially assumed I'd be using the netwg11t.inf file, but I only got the desired results (sort of) with this one. Anyway, I installed that and checked out the installation using:

ndiswrapper -l

It listed the aforementioned athfmwdl driver as installed, and said that the hardware was found. Hurrah! I did a couple checks (desmod -a, I think...) and it all seemed to work.

Then I went into Administrator > Network and I didn't see any wireless options, like I assumed I would. I made sure wireless-tools was installed and ran iwconfig and didn't get any results (if I remember it said there were no extensions found for any of the options, but wlan wasn't even there in the first place...)

So it didn't work. At this point I figured I had done the whole thing wrong- the light on my dongle wasn't even lighting up. But then I tested ndiswrapper -l a couple times, and it could detect when I plugged and unplugged the dongle. That was weird, because otherwise my system made no other indication that it was installed at all.

So, uhh, that's where I leave you. I have what appears to be a working driver installed, which can detect when I have the adapter plugged in, yet still no way to connect. I'd appreciate any help at all, hopefully it's something obvious and easy to fix. Thanks.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Is the kernel module loaded? Are there any suspicious messages in the kernel log (dmesg?). Any other messages in the system log?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Hey, sorry about the long delay there. I appreciate your trying to help.

Anyway, the situation...well, it hasn't so much been "resolved" as it has been "postponed" or "given up on." I'm not going to be using Ubuntu again for a while, so there's no real need to worry about this anymore.

So this thread is basically useless now. Hurrah!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.