Hi folks. At the moment I'm a bit miffed. I am absolutely DEDICTATED to get gentoo to operate wirelessly on a thinkpad t21 using a dwl-g630 wireless card. I would appreciate any input anyone might have. here are the problems i am running into.

1) nothing other than "lo" listed via ifconfig command.

2) no iwconfig command. i believe this means that there are no wireless tools installed but i'm not sure. i did copy over the wireless_tools.27.tar.gz file and attempted to install it but i can't find any instructions ANYWHERE on how to install them.

3) after installing the proper *.inf file, it states that the file is invalid. that is impossible. it is the same file that i used when it did work for roughly three weeks on knoppix (although now even knoppix gives the same error). my olny guess is that this error is related directly to the lack of wireless tools but i'm not certain.

4) i have tried to uninstall the inf driver with a /bin/rm -rf /etc/ndiswrapper/net5211.inf in order to try a fresh install of the driver but again, i'm not certain that it is working.

i am at my wits end here folks. i've been at this for days with no success. i just can't seem to find anything useful. any suggestions would be appreciated. TIA

No offense, but it sounds like you are jumping around a lot and not doing things in the right order.

First, you have to have wireless tools installed. There is a good how-to on the Gentoo forums that include how to emerge the wireless tools if they aren't already there. Until you have these in place, there is no point in continuing.

Once you have the wireless tools up and running, then compile ndiswrapper. There is a truly excellent set of install (and uninstall) instructions at the ndiswrapper wiki.

i have finally installed the wireless tools. ndiswrapper though is putting up a very good fight. for some reason it tells me that the net5211.inf files is an invalid driver. this is a considerable setback since i was using the EXACT file under knoppix (hd install) for roughly three weeks. btw, ndiswrapper under knoppix says the same thing. i then pulled the file off of the cd AND d-link's website to no avail. i'm clueless now. however, since i have managed to install gentoo (albeit without a DE) i would just assume getting this fixed for this particular distro.

anyway, any suggestions or points in the right direction is as always appreciated.

Um, this statement is a bit confusing...Did it work under knoppix or not? Assuming that it did, there are a couple of things that spring to mind. If you've been using Knoppix with ndiswrapper successfully, I'd use the ndiswrapper version they used. I know the latest ndiswrapper (version 1.2) is a touch buggy. It wouldn't hurt to drop back a version or two. Second, make sure you're using the drivers that are linked from the ndiswrapper wiki. This card actually used a couple of different chipsets, so you need to make sure that you are using the right windows driver.

By the way, this isn't a 64 bit system is it?

it did in fact work properly under knoppix initially. however, i got it in my head that i wanted to attempt gentoo again so i wiped the hd and started over. after the first unsuccesfful attempt with ndiswrapper under gentoo i went back to knoppix. however, it didn't work so i am quite confused myself. i tried mepis and ndiswrapper worked but there was no wlan0. sort of after the fact i think that there was an eth0 or sit0 instead. im afraid that the gui config under knoppix was the only reason i had it working....again, noob at work. the os center in mepis makes far less sense to me and honestly, i think i would have better luck simply gutting it out with the cli...at least with that ability i could have a better chance getting it to work in other distros (like gentoo).

it is an atheros chipset but i am a bit taken back madwifi. i looked it up last night and none of the how to's made any sense to me. regardless, i had ndiswrapper working before. i should be able to get it up again.

no, sir. the machine is not a 64bit. it is however, a thinkpad t21.

i forgot to mention something. i have an old xterasys wireless card that i tried as well. same error occurred (invalid driver). i think that you might be right by thinking its ndiswrapper. especially when only some distros i have tried with different versions of ndiswrapper produce different results.

how does one uninstall ndiswrapper? i burned a disc with two other versions (1.0, 1.1) to try.

The best uninstall instructions I've ever found are at the ndiswrapper wiki. It is pretty straight forward really.

followed wiki to uninstall...worked. followed wiki to install including their suggestion for card driver....same result. using ndis version 1.0 yeilded an invalid driver file result.

gotta run to an interview. bbl thanx for all the help hangdog.

I shoulda picked up on this earlier.....

You have the .inf file, but do you have the .sys file in the same directory? You need both of them for this to work.

hangdog....thank you very very much! that was the trick! confirmed it be pinging my favorite website (www.google.com). i am no connected with my new gentoo linux laptop! currently i am emerging fluxbox. thank you sir for your patience. here goes another satisfied customer.

Glad I could help. By the way, fluxbox is awesome. By far my favorite WM!