ndiswrapper killing me

[Richard S. Crawford]

The elder gods, manifesting through Jeff Vian, recently decreed:

> On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 09:32 -0500, Jan Morales wrote:
>> Richard S. Crawford wrote:
>> > I'm running Fedora Core 3 on an HP zd8000. So far, so good. Except
>> today I
>> > attempted to get my wireless card working, and I'm having some
>> problems.
>> > ndiswrapper device wlan0 does not seem to be present, delaying
>> initialization.
>> >
>> > What could the problem be, and how can I fix it?
>>
>> I got a Linksys WPC54G card working with ndiswrapper, and I can tell you
>> that you will need to recompile the kernel with CONFIG_4KSTACKS=n
>> (default is y). It didn't work without this step. It's a bit of a job
>> getting the source and compiling it, but other than that, I was able to
>> get it working following the instructions.
>>
>> Jan
>
> I don't think his problem at present is related to the 4K stack. The
> wlan0 device is not being created.
> I had a similar problem and I had to add the following to modprobe.conf
> to get it to create the device automatically.
>
>     alias wlan0 ndiswrapper
>     options ndiswrapper if_name=wlan0
>
> I think I found those instructions somewhere in the ndiswrapper
> documentation, but I don't have that on the top of my head.
>
> Note that I have an AirLink card with the broadcom chipset, and on my
> laptop I did have to use the 16K stack kernel from
> http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/full/downloads-fc3-i686.php
> then compile ndiswrapper against that kernel (to fix the lock-up problem
> I had with the 4K stack kernel that comes with Fedora.)

Jeff is right in this case.  This is one of the few drivers that does not
require recompiling the kernel.

I went ahead and downloaded another driver from the ndiswrapper wiki list
page and installed it with ndiswrapper -i.

The new driver seems to work, to a point.  wlan0 is now recognized, and
iwlist wlan0 scan shows my wireless network is present and running, and
identifies the SSID.  However, when I attempt to add the encryption key
via iwconfig wlan0 enc XXXXXXXXXX, I get an error message reading "invalid
command" (or something similar; I'm at work now, so I don't have the
laptop in question in front of me).

I feel like I'm getting closer, and that this is a wireless-tools issue
now instead of an ndiswrapper issue.
-- 
Sláinte,
Richard S. Crawford (AIM: Buffalo2K)
http://www.mossroot.com   http://www.stonegoose.com/catseyeview
"We live as though the world were how it should be,
to show it what it can be."
--"Angel", Season 4 ep. 1