Oh the headache.

First things first and that's list out the hardware and software I been playing around with to get this to work finally. WRT54GS Router from Linksys, WMP54GS PCI card from Linksys, ndiswrapper v1.51, wpa_supplicant v0.5.9

I did some reading before I tried linux out on this machine to be sure I could at least get the wireless card working. Seemed a simple enough task according to the directions that I could find about it. Little did I know that it'd turn out to be a ton harder then I thought to which I'm still not sure it's 100% right. Right or not I'm connected somehow...

With a fresh install of Slackware 12.0 I proceeded to install ndiswrapper as instructed. When I got to the part of doing ndiswrapper -l is where I got my first headache.

Is the problem I ran into. Ok no sweat I thought, I read the troubleshooting part from ndiswrappers site and other users comments on such problem. blacklist bcm43xx in the /etc/modules.d/blacklist and I even did rmmod bcm43xx along with modprobe -r bcm43xx. I even uninstalled everything to try installing it all over again to still remain with the same return from a ndiswrapper -l.

I figured another good way to get rid of that module would to be recompile a kernel to use that doesn't have it installed or modulized. After going the process of doing that I seemed to have resolved that issue to arrive at another similar one with a slight difference.

So once again I do the blacklist, rmmod, modprobe -r again for ssb to still see that it persists. Tried another kernel compile to remove it unsuccessfully. After that I just decided to proceed with it all as is.

Seems that Slackware 12 came with a wpa_supplicant already installed for me of an older version so I started off with removing it via pkgtool. I unpacked, compiled, installed the wpa_supplicant as instructed. as I was about to make up a conf file I found that the pkgtool didn't remove the old one from /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf so I used that to edit from.

Now heres where a bit more of the headaches start. My router I have configured to not broadcast the SSID along wiht having the DHCP disabled. Under windows I prefer it that way and have no trouble getting on but with Linux I just couldn't figure out how to jump onto it with manual configuration. Everwhere I googled I always see setups using dhcp.

After much fiddling around I decide to at least see if the wireless card is working so I jumped onto my Wii to alter my router settings to broadcast the SSID and turn DHCP back on. After making them settings I now find myself connected ^.^

So much hassle it seemed but at least it's now down. Just hope I can find info on how to connect without dhcp on which I prefer to have turned off. Now only if I could figure out why I can't get the ATI drivers working... startx with them gives me a black screen that does seemingly nothing >.<

I've toyed with Linux here and there alot easier then this on other machines but this is the first time I had to get one going with wireless and ATI.

I see it is working now. For your interest: Kernel 2.6.23 and later include a new b43 driver that is based on the mac80211 wireless stack. On its site your network card is listed as supported device. The module works without a problem here (kernel 2.6.24 now, although my card is a differend brand), only additional step was to install firmware as stated on www.linuxwireless.org. If you have some spare time after fiddling with your ATI card you might want to check this out