I am forced to use the WMP54G Wireless lan that uses the bcmwl5 driver. I installed ndiswrapper from the sources through 'make && make install'. That went off without a hitch. I got the drivers loaded and everythign was copesetic, did ndiwrapper -m that was fine then when i went to modprobe ndiswrapper it tells me 'ndiswrapper: Unknown symbol wireless_send_events' in dmesg I went back into make menuconfig and updated my kernel to support wireless lan and redid ndiswrapper totally and still got the same thing, then i got the source for wireless-tools and installed that and tried to modprobe ndiswrapper again and still the same error. What else can I do?

[ EDIT: I need some sleep now... stayed up till 5 yesterday woke up at 10 and now i tis 5 AM again this gentoo has kept me up and aggrivated all night i will be back in 5 hours please give me any help you can ]

Dont know if this will help but its worth a shot. FIrst of all do you have pciutils installed. if not install it, also are you using the drivers from the cd or the websit. i read another forum that said to use the ones from the cd and not the website.

1. make uninstall the ndiswrapper you currently have.
2. make sure kernel is built with 8k stacks and not 4k (# CONFIG_4KSTACKS is not set )
2. emerge ndiswrapper
3. ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5.inf
4. ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5a.inf
5. ndiswrapper -l (to verify drivers and hardware recognized)
6. modprobe ndiswrapper
7. add ndiswrapper to /etc/modules.autoload.d/<kernel-version>
8. update-modules

module will autoload at start. read back through the install docs about how to add a script to start the net interface at boot if desired.

It seems your kernel haven't got wireless support compiled in. Are you sure you included averything needed in your kernel? Are you sure you're using your new kernel?

You do know you have to recompile your kernel after changing the config, right?
You did reboot?

I am sorry if i offend you but it really seems like your kernel doesn't support wireless.

Thank you, no apepost you did not offend me this is indeed the first time that i have tried sing gentoo i know that i using the correst divers for my nic because i have used these before using gentoo in other distros. i did recompile my kernel 'make' afte editing it. i will look for the 4_STACKS thing, is there something i have to do after recompiling my kernel. because i did reboot and that didnt do it. thanks. (PS. how do uninstall gentoo and I did install pciutils and the nic is seen in lspci it jsut isnt supported readily by any distro )

By the way i ran iwconfig just for the heck of it and got 'lo no wireless extensions' so i believe that tells me that wireless tolls is isntalled

And again all i did was

I'll try to explain this in a user friendly way. Don't hesitate to ask for clarification on any of the steps.

1. cd into the source directory for ndiswrapper that you have installed. as root, run the command "make uninstall" without the quotes. This will remove the current installation of ndiswrapper.

2. as root cd into /usr/src/linux. make menuconfig.
---->Device Drivers--------->Networking Support------------>Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)
Wireless LAN drivers (non-hamradio) & Wireless Extensions needs to be * the rest can be empty.

---->Kernel hacking--------->
Use 4Kb for kernel stacks instead of 8Kb needs to be UNSELECTED

3. Save and exit the kernel config menu.
4. make && make modules_install
5. cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/your_new_kernel_name
6. cp System.map /boot/System.map-your_new_kernel_name
7. set up your bootloader to include the new kernel as a boot option.
8. Reboot, select new kernel.
9. as root nano -w /etc/make.conf
In your USE flags add wifi and pcmcia if not already there. Save and exit the file
10. emerge ndiswrapper
11. env-update && source /etc/profile
12. ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5.inf
13. ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5a.inf
Yes. TWO driver files if you have them both on your cd. some cards use the first one, some the second one. Install both to be sure.
14. ndiswrapper -l
15. modprobe ndiswrapper
16. nano -w /etc/modules.autoload.d/<your-kernel-version> . Add ndiswrapper to anything that may be listed there.
17. update modules

I followed your steps exactly and i dont think that ndiswrapper uninstalled all the way. when i went to ndiswrapper -i my drivers it told me they were already installed so i did ndiswrapper -e and i reinstalled the drivers and when i did modprobe ndiswrapper i got this in dmesg:

sorry about the double post but its an effort to bumb it back up because i still need help.

By the way when i did emerge ndiswrapper it failed because it needed to grab files form the internet so i went to the sources i have, and did make && make install for that step.

is it possible yet to make this work or will i just need to reformat is, sorry if that is a really stupid question.

You'll also have to make sure you have wireless-tools, pcmcia-cs, and coldplug emerged/installed.

One way to get it all via portage would be to chroot into gentoo from another OS/live cd, and emerge --fetchonly, then reboot to gentoo and emerge the normal way- it will use the sources downloaded earlier. The way you've done it PROBABLY won't work, because Gentoo patches almost all their ebuild sources, so the vanilla ndiswrapper source will be lacking something that Gentoo expects.

The way I posted above is how I got it working with a broadcom chip card. The important part is the kernel config.
Are you using genkernel or building it by hand?
Are you SURE you're booting to the new kernel?
Are you SURE you have wireless extensions enabled, and 4k stacks disabled?

If you can get to the point where you're 100% positive of the above, ndiswrapper can be emerged and configured without too much fuss, even if chrooting from another os or manually downloading the ebuilds is needed. Check into your kernel, and see if things are as they should be, then post back.

I do nto know that i was booting into the new kernel, and myself being how i am, i freaked otu and started over but that is ok i am changing my kernel options so that they are how they are supposed to be from the start. i am currently compiling the kernel in the install with 4STACKS disabled and wireless enabled. thank you for your help.

Edit:

I did successfully install ndiswrapper and modprobe it through my new fresh gentoo install. I made sure that i had 4STACKS disabled and that wireless lan was enabled in the kernel setup, that lspci was emerged and that wireless-tools were installed and i got it up! :-D