known good PCI wireless NICs for FC2

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:28:51 -0700, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
> 
> Back in 20 minutes...
> 

Sorry for so many emails. This is all turning out to be a bit too much
stream of consciousness...

OK, so it took a bit more than 20 minutes, but I've made more headway
than in my last go-around with this stuff. I grabbed the .sys file,
placed it (for lack of any instructions) in /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5,
and then gave the next instruction a try:

[root at flash root]# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5a driver present, hardware present
[root at flash root]#

That all looks quite nice. The modprobe step goes fine:

[root at flash root]# modprobe ndiswrapper
[root at flash root]#

The driver seems to be installed:

ndiswrapper version 0.11 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
ndiswrapper: using irq 5
divert: allocating divert_blk for wlan0
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:90:4b:4d:e3:e8 using driver bcmwl5a
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP
ndiswrapper: driver bcmwl5a (Broadcom,07/17/2003, 3.30.15.0) added
[root at flash root]#

More good results:

[root at flash root]# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462GHz  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
          Bit Rate:54Mb/s   Tx-Power:25 dBm
          RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:100/100  Signal level:-10 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:779   Missed beacon:0

[root at flash root]#

[root at flash root]# iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
[root at flash root]#

At this point I don't think I can go further as I'm in the office and
my access point is at home, so this will have to wait, but I do have
some questions in getting ready for the weekend:

1) Do I need to do anything more than add ndiswrapper to
/etc/modprobe.conf to get this far the next time I boot? (I can try
this out in a minute but figured I'd ask.)

2) Can I do WEP 128-bit encryption with this? It appears supported in
the info above, but does it work? It is the Windows driver
(presumably) so I assume all of that is supported?

3) Anything else I should be aware of?

Thanks,
Mark