Hello, I recently installed Slackware 11 on this IBM T22 Thinkpad I have lying around. I've been fooling around with linux for a little bit now and I guess I want to start being more serious about it. Along with that I wanted to get this wireless pcmcia card I have up and working so I can be (mostly) untethered. Unfortunately I've been having no end of trouble getting this linux-wlan-ng driver thing working (as per Linksys' knowledge base instructions). I don't consider myself a complete newbie when it comes to Linux, but this is just driving me crazy due to these seemingly illogical behaviors.

Each time I get through the make phase I get at least one error (prism2_cs.c:29: error: syntax error before "int") followed by several warnings from the same line. Once I get to the make install phase (I use checkinstall) it throws a "cp: cannot stat 'prism2_cs.o': No such file or directory" error (I assume because it couldn't compile prism2_cs.c for whatever crap reason, ergo, the file doesn't exist) and aborts the installation. I've also noticed that when I run the Configure script, despite me choosing yes on the first option (Build Prism2.x PCMCIA Card Services (_cs) driver?) it never prompts me to enter the pcmcia-cs source directory. Just plain skips it.

Never asks for it. I really don't know what I should be doing. I looked at the code for the configure script and although I can't really understand the syntax of the script that well, I can see that it should be asking for the source directory provided $PRISM2_PCMCIA is equal to "y" and $WLAN_KERN_PCMCIA is not equal to "y". Kind of greek to me.

Also of note, I just checked the hardware compatibility list and saw that I have a WPC11 version 4, which uses a Realtek chipset and not a Prism one. Does this mean that I should give up to work on something else because it's just not compatible with linux/this driver? If that is the case, I'd like my previous question answered as at least a learning experience (considering the driver/my system has absolutely no idea what this card is and should still theoretically install).

Thanks in advance.

Wow that was a long post.

Yes, give up using a Prism driver with that card. Any WPC11 up to v3 will work with wlan_ng or orinoco_cs. Not the v4.

Most of the reports of success I've seen used ndiswrapper.

Alright, bringing this thread back up.

So I got ndiswrapper, I looked up the driver that is compatible with my wireless card and download it. I install ndiswrapper and install the driver as per the instructions. Everything looks great, driver loaded and device present, awesome. Modprobe ndiswrapper - flawless. I bring up ifconfig, there's the wlan0 interface. I configure wlan0 to give me the 192.168.1.31 ip with the proper subnet mask and take eth0 down. Use iwconfig to set the essid and such. Everything looks shiny, I even open up the KWiFiManager thingy and see that I have a perfect signal, settings are good there...

But there's no internet access. Can't access anything beyond the router. I can ping the router, I can ping another computer on the network (and vice-versa), but no remote urls. I'm thinking I need to set the gateway, but I can't find an option in i[f/w]config to set that

Also I've noticed that when I restart the computer it resets all the settings back to before I used the modprobe ndiswrapper; i.e.- no wlan0 interface, nothing in iwconfig. How can I get it to remember these settings for each time I restart?

You can load ndiswrapper by putting an entry in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules or /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.

Maintain persistent settings by putting your wireless parameters in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf, including your gateway.

Since you're not using DHCP, you'll need to add DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf

Thanks for the help 2gnu, guess this stuff isn't as easy as expected. I put the command in rc.modules and it didn't load, still had to modprobe ndiswrapper when I restarted.

The IP and such of wlan0 is showing up good once I do that though, but when I do a route -n it looks like only eth0 has a gateway

I'd be lying if I said I knew what all that means, What am I doing wrong?

Edit: Oh yeah, and I put the gateway under "# Default gateway IP address:" next to GATEWAY=

MEGA EDIT: Haha, oh wow. I put the modprobe ndiswrapper in rc.modules-2.6.17.13 instead and rebooted. Once I logged in the internet and everything was working beautifully. I'm investigating to see if I changed anything else, though. I don't quite fully understand how route works, but now it looks like that last line it using wlan0 instead of eth0. Could someone shed some light on this for me?