Back in October, I wrote:

> I found two classes of solution for wireless lan cards: a native linux 
> driver, or "ndiswrapper".  (ndiswrapper - in case anyone hasn't met it 
> - provides an environment in which win32 wireless lan drivers can be 
> used, subject to some restrictions I gather.)

I've been fiddling with ndiswrapper, in odd moments since, and I had 
managed to get it to work, but only with fiddling about and occasional 
crashes.  To the extent that I didn't feel it was worth writing 
anything up yet.

However, with the availability of ndiswrapper version 1.1, I can 
report more stable results so far http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Once configured, the card starts up fine by itself, if it is in place 
at boot-up time.

I've done this with at least two different card types - one based 
on the rt2500 chipset and one on the ti1130 chipset (and had earlier 
tried a third one which I borrowed for testing).

Test platforms so far have been IBM R50e and R40e laptops.

I'm still not fully clear on the interaction between the SL 
hotplugging routines and the driver itself, but - as long as one 
adjusts the modules.conf line to make the interface name be (say) eth1 
instead of wlan0:

 options ndiswrapper if_name=eth%d
 alias eth1 ndiswrapper

with eth1 defined via the gnome Internet Configuration Wizard to be a 
wireless interface, then the interaction *does* seem to be beneficial.



It's also possible, having booted up without the card in place, to 
insert the card afterwards, and start it up manually.  Although I have 
to admit I'm having a bit of trouble doing this reliably.


So much for getting the network going! Taking the card down, however, 
does seem to have to be done manually: in the sense of first taking 
down the eth1 interface, then "rmmod ndiswrapper", before attempting 
to remove the card from the slot.

Attempting to remove the card from the slot while the ndiswrapper 
driver is loaded is pretty much guaranteed to crash linux (-> Morse 
code on the LEDs, as previously discussed).

There are several things that I don't know, which might be useful to 
have.  In particular, it seems to be necessary to configure the 
correct SSID, rather than letting the software find it for itself.
Even though "iwlist scan" seems quite capable of scanning and 
reporting the available SSIDs.


If anyone has any other advice to contribute, then I'd be only too 
happy to learn from it.