so, i'll start with the good news first. i was able to get wpa up and running with my smc2835w pcmcia wireless card. but the caveat is that i had to use driverloader from linuxant. right now i am on my free 30 day trial. preferably, i would like to use ndiswrapper to do the same thing. but i cannot get that to work.

now you know the bad news- that ndiswrapper is not working for me. in fact, i have not changed anything between using driverloader and ndiswrapper. that is, i use the exact same winXP driver files for the smc2835w, i use the same wpa_supplicant and of course, i use the same configuration/startup files when switching between trying one versus the other.

it would seem that the ndiswrapper fails a bit after loading the winXP drivers. i use the command:

ndiswrapper -i <file>.inf

and it seems to work (no errors). i check with:

ndiswrapper -l

and the output says that the driver is loaded and the hardware is present. and yet when i check dmesg, the output gives me a bunch of stuff saying that ndiswrapper got set up on IRQ8 and other stuff that would suggest it is working. but finally, the last line says that "Windows failed to initialize the device"

my question to those of you with more experience than me is: should i conclude that ndiswrapper just won't work for my setup? it is the only variable that changes between my two tests. or is there something i can try or do to try and get ndiswrapper to work?

thanks for your help.

It's possible that your card has a native linux driver, in which case you wouldn't have to monkey with ndiswrapper. Be sure to look through the softmac section as well as apparently some of the newer Prism based cards don't work with the older drivers.