Microsoft MN-720 driver update

It's been awhile since I've written anything for blogspot. Over the past few weeks I've been very busy with non-computer related issues. I'm very glad to report that I now have my Microsoft MN-720 wireless adapter working with SuSE 9.2 without any crashes during the module load, or when I shut down my system.

The key is NOT using the Microsoft mn720-50.inf driver, but a homebrew driver created by the good folks at Ankhcraft, a web development business. The driver is located at: http://ankhcraft.com/drivers/mn720-ankh.zip.

Now if you've never installed the MN-720 before under SuSE you'll need to download/install the ndiswrapper software package. It is a part of SuSE 9.2, so you don't need to go to sourceforge to download it.

Once ndiswrapper is installed you need to unzip the driver I mentioned above. Note: it's zipped, not tarred, so you need to unzip it. Then run as root the command:

ndiswrapper -i mn720-ankh.inf

There are two other steps I decided to do: create a wireless profile which had normal eth0 wired routing removed and load the ndiswrapper driver on startup.

For creating profiles see the SuSE documentation, it's a topic that's a bit lengthly to go into here.

To load ndiswrapper on startup load YaST --> Systerm --> /etc/sysconfig Editor. Then click from the Tree view on the left System --> Kernel --> MODULES_LOADED_ON_STARTUP. In the empty space on the right top enter ndiswrapper.

Since using the Ankhcraft drivers I've had no problems with freezing, the CD-based Microsoft drivers were to fault because they require a really big stack!