Wireless networking setup

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 12:59:32 +0000, Paul Hendrick <cmsphend at livjm.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm trying to set up a wireless network, but i can't even set the
> desktop machine to be an access point(if thats what i need to do! :)
> The way I understand it, I'll have my desktop, wired to my router...so
> 
> [internet]<-->(router)--wire--(Desktop1)<---wireless--->Desktop2.
> 
> So how do I get desktop1 to send a signal? I've used the network-admin
> tool to add the wlan device, but it WILL NOT enable. and (even after
> restarting the network service), the output of iwconfig still shows
> this:
> Code:
> wlan0 IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed
> 
> when my essid is set to local_wlan, and i WANT the mode to be ad-hoc.
> 
> This is getting stupid now! ndiswrapper -l shows
> Code:
> bcmwl5  driver present, hardware present
> 
> the network-admin tool hangs for ~30 seconds when trying to add the
> device, so obviously something isn't going right?

Mine worked perfectly the first time, and it sounds like you did the
same thing. But just in case, here's what I did:
1) Installed ethernet & wireless cards
2) Installed ubuntu
3) The ethernet card was detected and activated
4) Added the ndiswrapper package using synaptic
5) Installed the broadcom driver for my linksys card:
  sudo ndiswrapper -i /path/to/file/on/driver/cd.inf
6) added ndiswrapper to /etc/modules
7) because I wasn't ready to reboot I inserted the module in the running system 
  sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
8) The wireless interface was selectable and I configured it using the
networking tool.

HOWEVER When I rebooted it did NOT reactivate the wireless interface
exactly as I had set in the networking tool, so I went in and manually
made a couple of changes in /etc/networks/interfaces, and I also
manually started it using
sudo ifup wlan0 

Your next step will be to make the system pass data from one interface
to another, and I will have to defer to someone a bit more expert than
I for that next step.

Let me know if what I just wrote helped anywhere -- look especially at
step 6....