Does the kernel off the live cd support wireless or not?=not

turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1698

Does the kernel off the live cd support wireless or not?
In particular ndiswrapper.
thanks
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2006 10:26 am Post subject:

turtles,

No. No liveCDs can support ndiswrapper directly as the Windows XP drivers required are not under the GPL.
Knoppix provides ndiswrapper but you have to arrange your own WindowsXP drivers to actually use it.

Knoppix provides all the tools you need to do a manual Gentoo install, if thats what you want to do.
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turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1698

Thanks for the reply

I guess I need to rephrase.
Assuming that anywhere the installer ask about wireless the yes option was selected.

If one installs the genkernel generic kernel from the live cd, completes the install as per handbook is it necessary to recompile the kernel before emerging ndiswrapper or other wireless configuratioin.

thanks again turtles
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 9:33 pm Post subject:

turtles,

The installer does not ask about wireless. Its doesn't support it so it doesn't ask.

ndiswrapper builds against the kernel. It needs the sources installed at /usr/src/linux and required that they be configured.

The installer does not provide any kernel sources, so the answer to you question is that you need the kernel sources and ndiswrapper to build ndiswrapper. I have a feeling that you need to select some options manually in the kernel too, so that means you need to compile and install a kernel.

It looks like you need sneakernet to get the required files onto gentoo.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1698

Thanks again
I do have access to a the net via a LAN and I have never had a problem with live cd's or the new live CD GUI installer. It uses genkernel to make a kernel like a live cd kernel.
I am wondering if that generic kernel supports ndiswrapper without additional kernel recompiling? I am pretty shure it gave me the opurtunity to do somthing like menuconfig where there is an option for wireless support which I enabled.
Nice tip about the networkless install though.
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turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1698

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 9:08 pm Post subject:

turtles,

lspci reads the PROM from the card and looks up the Vendor and Device IDs in a database.
It displays what it finds there, or (Unknown Device) if the database is out of date.
lspci -n shows you numbers.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1698

Interesting so lspci is not a good indicator of weather the card will work or not?
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 11:48 pm Post subject:

turtles,

No, not at all - its just a database.
However, given the data from lspci (in either form) you can feed it to google and thats a very good indicator.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.