I have this wifi card: WG311v3 - G54 Wireless PCI Adapter;
that only work in Windows with specific driver. How can i use it too with GNU/Linux ?
I read about the wine program but here they said that we can't install drivers in wine.
Is there an other solution ?
41 Answer
The tool for getting Windows network drivers to work in Linux is called NdisWrapper (wiki, downloads). NDIS (Network Device Interface Specification) is the Windows network driver API; NdisWrapper is a Linux kernel module that basically presents a fake Windows kernel to a Windows network driver and translates between that and normal the Linux network driver interface.
NdisWrapper isn't perfect - it doesn't support all drivers and it may crash your Linux system - and free software advocates don't like it because it's basically loading proprietary code (the Windows driver) into a F/LOSS OS kernel. With that said, though, it often can be made to work. You may have better luck using drivers targeted at older Windows versions, since the NDIS spec changes somewhat over time; if you can't find an XP driver for the card, look for a Vista/Win7 one, then Win8/8.1 if you can't find that.
It's a little more complicated to install and configure than is typical for either native Linux drivers or drivers on Windows, but if you want to run Linux on not-fully-compatible hardware it may just let you do that thing.
Edit
Since you added the version, I did a search for "WG311v3 Linux", which led me to quite a few links. Consensus seemed to be that yeah, no native Linux support but it works fine in ndiswrapper. Many pages contained dead links for the old (XP) driver download, but by following a link from the very first result I found . That page not only has a live link, it contains both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers as actual driver binaries (.sys files) for XP. These binaries are confirmed compatible with ndiswrapper, at least on old versions (and should still work fine), and you can also find links to install directories. So, there you go!
