(Edit: Reworded to sound more like I know what I’m talking about)

I have 2 wireless cards. Hermes chipset (Orinoco card) and Prism chipset (SMC card) installed at different times.

I am running Slackware 10 on my laptop. Using Shmoo drivers for the Orinoco card and HostAP for the SMC card.

I cannot use the Linux Wireless Extensions with the Prism card.
The Hermes card seems to work just fine. (well the configuration settings that are suppose to work with it.. does.)

With the Prism card. I can only set the nick name, the power timeout options, the WEP key, and the mode (master, managed, ad-hoc).
All other options are not available. Example:
#iwconfig wlan0 essid off
#iwconfig wlan0 nwid off
#iwconfig wlan0 sens
Do not work with this card/drivers.

I’m wondering if this is a driver problem. How can I go about troubleshooting this issue?
I checked the FAQ on the HostAP ReadMe file but I did not see anything about this. From the error message below, it sounds to me like I either need different drivers for this or I don’t have them loaded correctly.

This is the error I receive when trying to configure the above settings
#iwconfig wlan0 nwid off
Error for wireless request "Set NWID" (8B02) ;
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.


Thank You
^_^

Quick guess from what I understand here.

You don't have an alias define in /etc/modprobe.conf or /etc/modules.conf for your wireless card eth1 or whatever do you? If so remove it. Then try to configure it again.

Brian1

This is what I have in my /etc/modules.conf

# --- Begin: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. ---
# --- ALSACONF version 1.0.5 ---
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
alias sound-slot-0 snd-intel8x0
# --- END: Generated by ALSACONF. do not edit. ---


The /etc/modprobe.conf is empty.

I'm sorry if I am missing something here. Im still quite new to linux.

Thank You

Okay I found this website that gives some good detail about installing HostAP. Even though its a bit outdated, it still helps.

http://www.trekweb.com/~jasonb/artic...20030727.shtml

This is the part I found interesting

***
Next, you'll need to edit your /etc/modules.conf in a distribution friendly way (via update-modules in Debian) file and add the following, dependant on which driver you need:

# choose one
alias wlan0 hostap_pci
# or
alias wlan0 hostap_cs
# or
alias wlan0 hostap_plx

***

what is _pci, _cs, and _plx mean? Is that the "slot" the card would be using? For a workstation, then would it be _pci if you are using a PCI slot for your card?