AirLink101 AWLC3025 wireless NIC

[Quasimojo]

Hello. Though I've actually installed Linux several time in the past on spare PC's I've had sitting around, and even gone so far as hosting Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Trounament servers on them for a while, I'm still a relative Linux n00b. Basically, I merely learned what I needed to know to set those servers up at the time. I have l33t instruction-following skillz. I briefly tinkered with Gentoo at one point (I loved the Portage system), but for various reasons (largely a lack of knowledge) never got too deep into it.

Now I'm revisiting Gentoo with an old IBM ThinkPad A20m laptop. The problem is that the on-board NIC doesn't work, so I'm having to use an AirLink101 AWLC3025 wireless cardbus adapter for which there is no driver provided by either Gentoo or AirLink101. I've heard of people using an "NDIS wrapper" of some sort to allow cards with no Linux support to operate in Linux using a Windows or DOS driver (if I understood correctly).

Are there any step-by-step guides for implementing drivers in this fashion? Those steps would need to involve uncompressing (un-tar'ing?) the file where all I have is the laptop booted to the command prompt with the 2005.1 universal CD.

Thanks!

[koenderoo]

You are sooooo close!

The howto is described in this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125627 .
I still thank Scootersmk every time I have to use this Howto. You probably do this as well after you've installed it.

[Quasimojo]

Thanks for the link. It did get me farther than when I tried the ndiswrapper approach before. This time it actually detected the hardware. However, I was still unsuccessful. From another post:

One thing I noticed when recompiling the kernel was at the end of the process I saw more than a screen full of warning messages. The first one (first one visible that is - I believe there were more that scrolled off the screen) was:

WARNING: /lib/modules/2.6.12-gentoo-r6/ndiswrapper-1.8.driver/loader.o needs unknown symbol wrap_pnp_remove_pci_device

The following were several more of the same, all ending with:

...needs unknown symbol __udivdi3
...needs unknown symbol miniport_set_info
...needs unknown symbol miniport_query_info
...needs unknown symbol miniport_set_int
...needs unknown symbol miniport_query_int
...needs unknown symbol miniport_query_info_needed
...needs unknown symbol miniport_reset

...and involving objects: iw_ndis.o and hal.o.

If these mean anything to anyone, please let me know. I'd really like to get this NIC working.

On an additional note, I went ahead and just installed Ubuntu on this laptop just to see if it made a difference, and voila - the NIC worked. Ubuntu detected it and configured it without any input from me. Trouble is, Ubuntu performace is terrible, even by Windows 2000 (my previous OS on this machine) standards. Too much stuff included in the installation package, I'm assuming - at least too much for this old laptop, anyway.

So, now I just need to figure out what driver Ubuntu is using and how to go about getting it and making it load automatically in Gentoo. Any tips in that regard would be much appreciated. Where would I start looking?

[koenderoo]

I see you're working with ndiswrapper 1.18. This is 6 steps further then supported by Gentoo. The version supported at the moment is the 1.12-r1. You should download this from one of the mirrors of Gentoo to ensure you get the right version.
Or just look at the output of emerge -pf ndiswrapper to see what version is supported in your system (probably not up to date due to internet not working yet).
The list of mirrors can be found here: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml

Very well possible your kernel will work with this version.

[Quasimojo]

Thanks for the tip. I'll give that a shot.