this is probably one of the most common issues in the wifi world of linux.

getting ieee80211 to work.

I have hunted and searched for a single fix to this that works and frankly I havent found one that works the way it should.

you seem to have a choice: if your distro is wifi compatible use the one packaged for your kernel version, but in most cases the kernel is not compatible with something else and needs to be updated makeing the packaged version of 80211 cease to be useful...

this is a desperate plea: is there anyone out there that has successfully gotten 802.11 to work with the 2.6.18 kernel, and if so HOW?!?

Hrm, works fine for me.

Step 1, insert sabayon cd. Step 2, boot. Step 3, click install button. Step 4, enjoy...
I'm using 2.6.18-r2

Hmmm... Wow. A thourally useless responce indeed.

allow me to be more specific: I am by NO means new to linux. in fact I support linux for a living. the question I pose is posed as a customer. you see I dont have the luxury of telling my customer to install a diferant flavor of linux because many of my customers are useing proprietary software that requires their particular flavor of linux. some are actually running a LFS OS (linux from scratch) some use Red Hat, some Suse, some LFS, and some SCO. bacause of this all my approaches are taken from the most generic stance I can, meaning: FROM SOURCE!!! and in suse there is a problem. the ieee80211 subsystem is haveing issues. for example:

when compileing the kernel (in Gentoo) useing the options:
CONFIG_IEEE80211=m
# CONFIG_IEEE80211_DEBUG is not set
CONFIG_IEEE80211_CRYPT_WEP=m
CONFIG_IEEE80211_CRYPT_CCMP=m
CONFIG_IEEE80211_CRYPT_TKIP=m
# CONFIG_IEEE80211_SOFTMAC is not set
CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT=y

will compile the kernle with a fully functional ieee80211 stack that can be used by all the known intel (ipwXXXX) drivers,

however in suse, useing the same configuration will get you this error:
WARNING: Your kernel contains ieee80211 symbol definitions and you
are not useing the kernels default ieee80211 subsystem.

I dunno. I guess I am on my own for this one... not that it matters. like I said, I am not new to linux, just trying to get some outside help. and now I see how far this "community" has come.

You did ask...

"this is a desperate plea: is there anyone out there that has successfully gotten 802.11 to work with the 2.6.18 kernel, and if so HOW?!?"

Pointing out that there are distro's with the 2.6.18 kernel and working ieee80211 would be a valid answer to that question. If you didn't want to know, don't ask.

Don't have to get grouchy about it.

sorry man, dealing with this, difficult customers, AND a divorce... the frusteration gets overwhelming and tends to come out in the wrong places.

sometimes I regret being a tech.

BTW: I figured out my problem, not a fix for it... the issue is the IEEE subsystem is being built into two locations: once in /lib/modules and once in the vmlinuz image... this is no big deal but for the fact that when the ieee subsystem loads as a module it fails because it is already loaded in the kernel image. hence the failure. when I tried to remove it from the kernel build, it still loaded it for some unknown reason... the new question is:

is it possible to build the ieee80211 code (http://ieee80211.sourceforge.net/) INTO the kernel itself durring the actual kernel build? I heard a hinting that it is possible useing:

# make IEEE80211_INC=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include install

but there was not enough info to really tell me WHEN or WHERE to do this.

YOU and the posts before me are way more on top of YOUR Linux game than I am. That being said, with all due respect...I propose a model. Some of US software users and manipulators see a model of the Linux Kernel as being represented as a Mass Transit Bus. The people on the bus at any one moment represent the "loaded Kernel, including the modules". Looking at the traffic flow of Bus Riders, before and after that point in time reflects on different configurations that are part of the total chosen configurations. There are other configurations, available and theoretical <configurations> that complete the options total. When tweeking YOUR Linux Box, it is important to set the "doable" parameters in favor of the optimized parameters. This combination of software and hardware is the blood and guts of YOUR computing experience. It becomes less of a chore and more of Lifestyle when the compatibility increases and the downtime decreases. IMHO it is important to setup software and hardware together. So the settings are closer to the needed settings, and farther from the extravagant settings that may latter fail down the road. One of my success tools is..."Check the BIOS after each change in the System". It really helps to keep an eye on the little things early...

Are you using the same set of modules for all these different kernel builds?
I might be wrong, but it looks like that command would build and install the ieee80211 modules to me.