wireless problems

[matt81]

Im new to slackware and am trying to get my wireless pcmcia card to work properly.

Ive installed ndiswrapper and installed the correct drivers but i restarted my pc now i cant get wlan0 to show up on ifconfig or iwconfig
oh yea, i installed the wireless tools program also
when i first installed wlan0 showed up just fine now i cant get it to show at all ive tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver and ndiswrapper tells me that the drivers are installed and the device is present when typing ndiswrapper -l in console
it says:

driver installed
device (168C:0013) present

ive tried modprobe ndiswrapper
rmmod ndiswrapper then modprobe ndiswrapper but still cannot get wlan0 to show
and ive tried ifconfig wlan0 up and down
please help!!
im pretty sure i have the latest kernel and the most recent ndiswrapper installed so what am i doing wrong?

[MasonM]

Ok. A step at a time. When you installed ndiswrapper and then the windows driver to it, did you use the full path name to the windows driver .inf file? You need to use the full path.

Secondly, did you run ndiswrapper -m to create the needed alias?

Third, did you edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and uncomment the lines for IFNAME [4]="wlan0"

and USE_DHCP [4]="yes"
?



If you compile and/or install a new kernel you'll have to recompile ndiswrapper for the new kernel (you won't have to reinstall the windows driver though)

[matt81]

Ok. A step at a time. When you installed ndiswrapper and then the windows driver to it, did you use the full path name to the windows driver .inf file? You need to use the full path.

i changed the path to the ndiswrapper folder like this

cd /etc/ndiswrapper
then used the ndiswrapper command
ndiswrapper -i filename.inf

i followed the instructions from the ndiswrapper website to perfection and the driver was working until i rebooted

simply the answer to that question is no unless changing the entire directory is fine?

Secondly, did you run ndiswrapper -m to create the needed alias?

no i never realized i had to create an alias?!?
what exactly is an alias supposed to do?

Third, did you edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and uncomment the lines for IFNAME [4]="wlan0"

and USE_DHCP [4]="yes"
?

what is this file and what am i editing?
i did some research on things like netconfig and firewall scripts and notice a lot is happening from the /etc/rc.d/rc. files what are these boot config files?

ill certainly make sure i use this type of configuration whenever i decide to reinstall this wireless card! thank you

Although i decided to purchase my own wireless card (the one i was trying to configure was a friends that he wasnt using at the time) and the new card is an atheros chipset with madwifi drivers and works wonderfully! A little hint for people thinking of buying wireless cards for linux... dont get broadcom chipsets
atheros rules!!

but i would like to know more about the /etc/rc.d/ folder and what and where i want to configure!
thanks again!