So, I've installed gentoo on my laptop, which has a Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI card. Therefore, I got the appropreiate driver from dell (R94826.exe) and unzipped bcmwl5.inf from it (since that is apparently the driver I should be using). So, I install ndiswrapper with make and make install. But when I do make install, I get

WARNING: Kernel seems to have a 4K size stack option (CONFIG_4KSTACKS) removed; many Windows drivers will need at least 8K size stacks. You should read wiki about 4K size stack issue. Don't complain about crashes until you resolve this.

But, back to the main point: after I install, then I ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf and get ndiswrapper to find the device and the driver no problem (it says driver present, hardware present when I run ndiswrapper -l). So, I try modprobe ndiswrapper and get the following:

FATAL: Error inserting ndiswrapper (/lib/modules/2.6.14-gentoo-r5/misc/ndiswrapper.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg).

dmesg says:
ndiswrapper: Unknown symbol wireless_send_event

So, this seems unrelated to the earlier warning, but I'm not sure of anything really. It seems that my kernel doesn't like the ndiswrapper.ko file, but I'm not sure how to fix that. Thanks.

- Ryan

Ryan,

You'll want to recompile your kernel without CONFIG_4KSTACKS to avoid the warning message, though it may not be a problem for your particular driver. In either case, I strongly urge you to emerge the ndiswrapper ebuild rather than compiling from your own source. This will make sure you have the proper wireless tools and extensions installed as well. You'll also need to have wireless support enabled in the kernel.

Hope that helps.

Where in the kernel config menu is CONFIG_4STACKS?

It's under Kernel Hacking->Kernel Debugging. On my kernel, it is DISABLED by default (aka, 8k stack mode).

Sorry to be stupid, but I don't see any suboptions under kernel debugging. The kernel debugging module itself is disabled by default though. So, do I need to install the kernel debugging in order to disable CONFIG_4STACKS?

On another note, when I try to emerge ndiswrapper, it brings up an error and quits:

make[2]: *** [/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-1.2/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/wrapper.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/var/tmp/portage?ndiswrapper-1.2/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver ] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-2.6.14-gentoo-r5'
make: *** [default] Error 2

!!! ERROR: net-wireless/ndiswrapper-1.2 failed.
!!! Function linux-mod_src_compile, Line 505, Exitcode 2
!!! Unable to make KRSC=//usr/src/linux KVERS=2 6 all.

I've tried looking around to make some sense of this error, but all to no avail.

You haven't shown any actual error, just build scripts discovering the error. Look higher up.

There are a number of warnings just above no errors, but I can't find any other errors. How can I copy text out of eterm so that I can paste it in here?

And about the CONFIG_4STACKS, I found it by including Kernel Debugging and then the list showed up. So, I have done that and manually made sure that CONFIG_4STACKS had a no in .config, and it is recompling now.

So, I attempted to do emerge ndiswrapper > errors to access the errors, but it just printed the non-error prone part to the file, but it did make it easier for me to find the errors, so here are the warnings:

/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-2.3/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/loader.c: In function 'register_devides':
/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-2.3/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/loader.c:963: warning: assignment from incompativle pointer type
/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-2.3/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/ndis.c:1721:5: warrning: "LINUX_KERNEL_VERSION" is not defined
/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-2.3/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/wrapper.c:287:54: macro "halt" passed 1 arguments, but takes just 0
/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-2.3/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/wrapper.c: In functon 'miniport_halt':
/var/tmp/portage/ndiswrapper-2.3/work/ndiswrapper-1.2/driver/wrapper.c:287: warning: statement with no effect

And then the stuff I tpyed in the earlier post.

The rest of the stuff looks brutally routine, but I can put it all in if this still isn't the part generating the error.

OK, so I just realized that I have not been copying my kernel over to boot after recompiling it each time. So, one of the modules that I had recompiled in the last 24 hours or so did the trick.