FC5 issue with ndiswrapper

[Frank-Michael Fischer]

Michael Wiktowy wrote:
>
>
> On 3/23/06, *Josh Coffman* <josh_coffman at yahoo.com
> <mailto:josh_coffman at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     Has anyone gotten NetworkManager or the network gui
>     applet to recognize wlan0 usin ndiswrapper?
>
>     I can manage wlan0 fine in cli, but not the nice gui
>     tools. So I think its not an ndiswrapper of
>     wireless-tools problem. 
>
>
> I was trying to use the madwifi package with my NetGear 511T and
> NetworkManager acted quite squirrelly.  It works well enough with
> Ubuntu Breezy but not WPA. I was hoping that FC5 would bring me joy
> but not quite. I got to the point where NM would unreliably list the
> available APs but wouldn't connect to any of them (including
> unencrypted SSIDs) but that could have been signal strength issues.
> There was one bit of weirdness in that both a wlan0 and an ath0 was
> created when I tried to start just one.
>
> Is NM supposed to have WPA support built-in yet? I know that is on the
> roadmap but I don't know if it made it into FC5. I tried to start the
> wpa_supplicant service via system-config-services but it wouldn't run.
> So I ran it as a daemon with all the commandline switches in place but
> couldn't tell if it was working properly. There was no error output bu
> no success either and no GUI to set the key ... just iwconfig. :[
>
> /Mike
NetworkManager doesn't have WPA built-in, it uses the WPA supplicant
piece of software for interacting with the chip. Therefore: whenever WPA
supplicant fails in a certain HW situation, NetworkManager will fail,
too. This is e.g. the case with prism54. Thats why one needs ndiswrapper
as an intermediary in such case.

FMF