[Glastonbury] USB wireless card

[Tony Sumner]

I too am interested in getting wireless to work. I have been using a
Netgear MA111 USB adapter for a couple of years now with Red Hat 8.0
and I want to switch to Ubuntu and something is stopping me. Ubuntu
gives me a 2.6.8.1-3-386 kernel and this installs modules p80211 and
prism2_usb so I thought it would just be a matter of configuring wlan0
but no. Nothing happens. Several posts in the Ubuntu forum say that
you can either install ndiswrapper (and use the Windows driver) or
linux-wlan-ng (which is what I have now). The position of ndiswrapper
is odd; the Ubintu support page includes a HOWTO on it but if you run
it you get a warning that Ubuntu do not support it and anyway it is
cheating to use a non-free Windows driver. I agree, and anyway I
couldn't get ndiswrapper to work, so I chose the linux-wlan-ng route.
I got the software, linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1pre25.tar.gz, and unpacked it.
I also need the kernel source so I d/l the 2.6.8.1 source file and ran
'make menuconfig'. The linux-wlan-ng doc says you must at least run
'make menuconfig' but if that is all you do then linux-wlan-ng's
'make config' fails because you do not own a file version.h, so I did a
'make all' as well to compile the kernel and after that I do own version.h.
OK so far but then when I try to compile linux-wlan-ng this fails
with what looks like a simple coding error, viz

> /usr/src/linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1pre25/src/p80211/p80211conv.c:505: 
      error: invalid type argument of `->'

I tried pre24 too and that gave me the same error.  Pretty stupid
really when the module p80211 is in the kernel already.  What do you
think: does Ubuntu support wireless or not?

Tony Sumner
(hoping to get to a meeting when I am not on a Wednesday evening class 
on the history of jazz)