Gentoo ndiswrapper woes

intuitionsys · 10-03-2005, 01:00 PM

Okay the switch to Gentoo from "stripped-down-SuSE" has been a good thing pretty much in every respect except the ndiswrapper module (that I unfortunately need to use until I replace my LinkSys card) is giving me problems.

Using ndiswrapper 1.2 from the Gentoo emerge and 1.4 compiled from source both are disallowing setting the key on the card. I'm using the exact same Windows drivers I was using with the default SuSE ndiswrapper RPM that worked fine. I haven't tried dropping back to the version SuSE was using to see if that solves my problems but I was wondering if anyone else has run into this problem?

TheLlama · 10-03-2005, 11:52 PM

Have you followed this how-to ?

jmaclean · 10-04-2005, 10:48 AM

By key, are we talking about a wireless key?

What card are you using?

intuitionsys · 10-04-2005, 10:55 AM

No I haven't. Thanks for the link. After a couple hours of trying incrementally lower versions of ndiswrapper I finally decided to heck with it and ordered an Edimax card from one of my suppliers that uses the ralink chipset (rt2500 module) that I've used before with zero problems. It'll be a few days before it arrives so I may give that howto a go in the meantime if I have time. The built-in wireless in my main laptop doesn't support WPA so I can use the card there and finally set my wireless segment to WPA-only.

The good news is that the Gentoo setup is going well otherwise with a noticable increase in speed and a significant decrease in cold boot time. I should have made the switch ages ago. One weirdness I did encounter was that grub simply would not recognize my reiserfs boot partition (error 16 I think). Lilo works just fine though and may be a tad faster anyway.

DigitalExpl0it · 10-04-2005, 01:20 PM

strange im running ndiswrapper on gentoo just fine. What kernel are you running? Also does it compile right and does it load?

/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig wlan0 essid "essidname"
iwconfig wlan0 key "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
dhcpcd -t 10 wlan0

intuitionsys · 10-04-2005, 01:57 PM

I guess I should clarify; the module loads just fine (except the latest v1.4) but I get an error setting either the essid or any of the keys. I can change the mode between Ad-Hoc and Managed and a few other things but that's it. I always get either a "Set Encode" error or an "Invalid Arguement" error when using iwconfig. What's a mystery is that it worked fine with SuSE kernel 2.6.11 and v1.1 of ndiswrapper. My Gentoo system is running 2.6.12 and I've tried ndiswrapper versions 1.1 through 1.4 all with the same results.

Since the Edimax card is only 40 bucks I decided I'd forego the mystery and use the rt2500 module that probably has the best linux support (by the chipset manufacturer even) of any chipset. I built a Silverwolf system for someone else using that card and it was more reliable than the LinkSys I've been using in mine. I have nothing against LinkSys but their linux support is non-existant as everyone knows.

Btw once I get my Gentoo system set up and running again, my next step is to open-source the Silverwolf front-end and associated apps so hopefully within a month (a few weeks maybe?) there will be a new linux player on the block.

TheLlama · 10-04-2005, 03:12 PM

Exciting. I should have the first beta release of mine done in about a month too. It will be released open-source from the get-go. Of course, mine is a niche product, but with the way I designed the gui toolkit, it will run in X, SDL, or Framebuffer in addition to the VFD (the VFD being the whole reason I had to design a TK anyways).

DigitalExpl0it · 10-04-2005, 03:25 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by TheLlama

Exciting. I should have the first beta release of mine done in about a month too. It will be released open-source from the get-go. Of course, mine is a niche product, but with the way I designed the gui toolkit, it will run in X, SDL, or Framebuffer in addition to the VFD (the VFD being the whole reason I had to design a TK anyways).

nice, Id love to have a good Framebuffer Front End.

intuitionsys · 10-04-2005, 05:15 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by TheLlama

Exciting. I should have the first beta release of mine done in about a month too. It will be released open-source from the get-go. Of course, mine is a niche product, but with the way I designed the gui toolkit, it will run in X, SDL, or Framebuffer in addition to the VFD (the VFD being the whole reason I had to design a TK anyways).

Mine is a bit of a niche product as well, just a different niche

The original hardware and software design was for vehicles with OEM monitors (usually for an OEM navigation system). Mine requires X though, at least for now. Except for some minor reliance on arts and a couple kde libs for the spectrum analyzer, everything is Qt so I could probably move it to Qt Embedded on a framebuffer in the future. It will be interesting to see your progress. Keep us updated...

TheLlama · 10-04-2005, 07:10 PM

cool.. I'll explain the workings of the system in greater detail later. However, the way things are setup: it is just as easy to get input from X, from /dev/psaux, from /dev/input/mice, or even just a getch() loop. But, I'll save the explaination for later.

intuitionsys · 10-17-2005, 12:47 PM

The upgrade to Gentoo is almost done now. In the middle of things I also gave the new OpenSuSE 10.0 a whirl. Although many things are improved, some things are also broken (that may well be fixed in the 10.1 release). I can't say I'd recommend an upgrade to anyone using 9.3, but it does boot significantly faster now and uses the newer 2.6.13 kernel. My biggest problem was that artsd was all but unusable no matter what I tried. I also had to monkey with some startup scripts to get the radeon and drm working properly.

Anyway, wrt Gentoo, there is a noticable speedup in both cold boot time and running performance. I'm using a 2.6.13.4 vanilla kernel patched with the latest swsusp2. The only problem I'm having right now is that "iwlist ra0 scan" returns "driver does not support scanning" that I need to look into. It works fine and connects to any network but part of my frontend needs the scanning ability. Once that's solved it'll finally be back in the car. It took WAY longer than I expected to make the move but the difference in speed and stability was well worth it.

It will be interesting to see how well swsusp2 works over time. The swsusp used by SuSE (not swsusp2) was very unreliable.