This is the nature of ndiswrapper. It is pretty much broken by design, and only works with a few specifically-supported drivers. It's like running wine in the kernel, which is far, far worse than running it in userspace, because one wrong move and you kernel panic.
Ndiswrapper is not really intended for production use, and by all reports, even people who get it "working" will encounter stability, bandwidth or data corruption problems. Over the years I've tried it with over a dozen wifi chipsets, and every single one of them either crashed the kernel or had some kind of show-stopping behavior at runtime.
It's a bad solution to a tough problem. If no native driver at all exists for your wifi adapter, all you can do is:
- Try to file a bug with Ubuntu and see if anyone can get it working (extremely unlikely, as most bugs dealing with restricted drivers are ignored)
- Try to file a bug with ndiswrapper upstream and see if anyone is still maintaining it and looking at bug reports (extremely unlikely)
- Try upgrading to the latest kernel and compiling the newest ndiswrapper from source, as whatever Ubuntu is shipping is probably out of date
- Try googling for a Linux driver for your wireless chipset; due to licensing concerns, Ubuntu does not ship certain chipsets' native Linux drivers, even though they are open source... for example they refused to implement Ralink's rt2800 driver back before the mainline kernel developers built their own.
- Try another wireless chipset that is known to be natively supported on Ubuntu (best bet is Intel chipset or Qualcomm Atheros; Ralink is ok these days too)
I was afraid you'd say something like that :( well off to buy a new usb-wifi thing – jofrylli – 2012-08-13T20:53:45.270