Hey, this is my first post ever on the forums; I actually got an account just so I could get this question answered.

I have a Linksys WMP54G card in a box running Gentoo 2004.1, and I'm trying to get it to work, although there's also a wired ethernet card that's currently working as eth0 (in case you're curious, I'm trying to get away from using it because I'm having to currently use a 60 ft. network cable to turn my house into a spiderweb of CAT-5...the point is, it would be very nice to get my wireless card going).

Anyhow, I've installed ndiswrapper-0.8 and ran ndiswrapper -i on the appropriate driver (bcmw15.inf), so now I have the right directory under /etc/ndiswrapper. Good so far. Modprobe on the new module also works. I can even run ndiswrapper -l and it'll say that it's "present," and if I run lsmod, it shows up there too. HOWEVER, if I try to run iwconfig, I get nothing. No sign of a wlan0, same thing goes for dmesg.

I realize that there was a similar thread with some guy running Mandrake, but he never quite mentions how he gets iwconfig to ever work. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated: I'm pretty much at my wit's end.

what message do you get when you type in iwconfig? If you get a message saying that it is a bad command that means that you don't have that feature installed. The feature is called wireless tools. When I installed wireless tools then it let me do the iwconfig. After that I did the dhclient. You also have to have a rpm installed for that. That rpm is dhcp-client. When that is installed then you can type dhclient and that will find you IP and stuff like that. After that just type: ifconfig interface up where interface is you wireless card (ie wlan0). And that is it try it out.

try this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=45172

HTH

The output for iwconfig reads as follows:

#iwconfig
eth0 no wireless extensions
lo no wireless extensions

or

#iwconfig wlan0
wlan0: device not found

I have a dhcp client installed (dhcpcd, as that's what's on the portage tree), but that doesn't do me any good until I can get iwconfig working. Unfortunately, the solution in the thread that minrich linked to assumes this can be done. So basically, I'm still where I was: iwconfig will not go.

There's one detail I came upon just recently. If I run lsmod, I get something like

#lsmod
Module Size Used by
ndiswrapper agoodsoundingnumber 0

"0" means unused! This seems like it's my problem, but what do I do? One final note: lspci detects my card, for what it's worth. I've also tried setting this up with the wired network down (removed eth0 all together) and that didn't do any good. Thanks for the help that you guys have given so far!

Hey, I just figured it out: it turns out I needed that I had "loadndisdriver" was not in the /etc/modprobe.conf file, as I originally thought. Once I ran it, everything else fell into place.

However, I'd like to throw out a different problem. If this warrants a different thread, feel free to blast me: I'm not sure about proper forum etiquette yet. Here's the deal: as things are, at bootime, Gentoo will search for eth0 and attempt to assign it an ip address. If eth0 isn't connected to a cable, it will stall, so the only way I could test wlan0 was to connect the cable, boot, disconnect the cable. Ideally, I would like the system to check for an eth0 connection, and if that fails, give up and try connecting through wlan0. What is the cleanest, most automated (hopefully all handled in rc files) way that you can think of handling this?

# [favorite text editor executable (vim)] /etc/conf.d/net

add this line to /etc/conf.d/net
iface_wlan0="dhcp"

this will make it happen automagically at boot
# cp /etc/init.d/net.eth0 /etc/init.d/net.wlan0
# rc-update add net.wlan0 default

pretty sure, i've done this with many pcmcia configurations, but not pci w/ ndiswrapper...

tell me how it works

HAIL PURDUE!

Thanks, Zach, that worked just fine! There are only two things that I needed to toss in:

1. In net.wlan0, I wrote in a quick script that installs the ndiswrapper module, loads the driver, and configures wlan0. I had to throw dhcpcd in here, because it didn't do it otherwise, which was odd, but I'm not too miffed about it.
2. At bootime, the system tries to setup eth0, then wlan0, but since eth0 now isn't connected, dhcp hangs around for a while (60 seconds, to be precise). This is easily handled, of course, by switching the time it attempts to connect down to something reasonable but short, like 2 seconds, with the command dhcpcd -t 2 eth0.

So now networking is setup just the way I want it, so fix my Xorg problems, yah slacker (a new thread will be started shortly concerning this)! But I think I'm being completely objective when I agree with your "Hail Purdue" and proclaim that Purdue's CS Dept. does indeed rock all socks. But that's a completely objective observation. Anyone would agree to it, it's not like you would have to go to Purdue to say that. Which we don't.

*psst* I think they bought it.