I've been wrestling with my wireless NIC for a week now. I've exhausted all of my resources and am hoping somebody can help me.

Kernel: gentoo-sources-2.6.11 with 8KB stacks, CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y, and APIC support (I've read some forums that suggest this might cause some wonkiness, so I've tried without it, same results) and wireless-tools.

Wireless Chipset: RT2500 (I hate this chipset!)

First, I tried ndiswrapper. The module installed correctly, modprobes correctly and when I type "ndiswrapper -l" it spits out "rt2500 driver present, hardware present," however when I check iwconfig, all that it returns is "lo," (which, obviously, doesn't have any wireless extensions).

I've also tried emerging RT2500, which *does* give me a wireless interface (ra0), but "iwlist ra0 scan" gives no results...and, in any case I have to connect to this awful apple router (!) with WPA encryption, so this package really does me no good.

I consider myself a linux newbie, so please suggest *anything* you think might work.

Thanks.

When you had ndiswrapper installed and you typed "iwconfig wlan0" or "iwconfig eth0" (try around a bit cause this seems to change per card). Does that work? Until I added wlan0 to my /etc/network/interfaces file it didn't give mine automatically either when I typed iwconfig.

For ndiswrapper you need to "modprobe ndiswrapper". Then a wlan0 (or wlan1 or whatever) interface should appear. For the wpa I think you need wpa_supplicant.

The rt2500 native driver is actually pretty mature. My fear is that the version you're getting via emerge is dated. Go to http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and get the latest. The readme has VERY simple instructions for installing the driver. Once you have it installed, you need to update your kernel modules with:

depmod -a

then, modprobe the driver with:

modprobe rt2500

then, bring the interface up with:

ifconfig ra0 up

At that point you can use "iwlist ra0 scan" and you should get some results. Sometimes you need to do it twice, but it works. I actually am pretty happy with the rt2500 chipset. Very reliable.

--Akshun J