Turning a wireless card into an access point

[Guilherme Rocha]

Hi everyone,

 I am sort of new to linux and I am deeply confused about some
things. I want to turn my laptop (Toshiba Satellite A25-S207) wireless
card into a access point. I guess I may be making things more
complicated than needed. I am not an experienced user so, it is
possible that I have found what I want but need to put pieces
together.

 Here are some of the questions I have:

 1. It seems that knowing the chipset of the wireless card is
important: what is the chipset and how do I find this information? I
checked the "detailes specs" from Toshiba and all I could find for the
wireless card was "Integrated Wireless LAN (Agere)". Is Agere the
chipset? It seems that it is the manufacturer. I tried searching their
webpage (www.agere.com) for the "Toshiba A25" in the hope that they
would mention that it uses their card. If they do, the info is buried
deep down somewhere...

 2. I have read some stuff about setting the mode of the wireless
card to Master. I tried
 > sudo iwconfig mode master
 and got:
 > Error : unrecognised wireless request "master"

 3. It seems that not all drivers support the master mode. Who
supports the master mode: the driver or the hardware itself? Who does
what?

 4. I've read something about a orinoco_cs driver for wireless cards.
It seems that it is possible to use it to turn the wireless card into
an access point. Is this true? If positive, how do I know whether it
gets along well with my hardware? How do I switch to this driver?

 5. Is there a simpler way to do all this? I thought it would be as
simple as typing "sudo iwconfig mode master" in command line, but I
now find myself confused by everything I've been reading...

 6. If you think these questions repetitive, please, give me some
tips on how to dig information out of the net.

 Thanks for any comments.

 G.

--
Guilherme V. Rocha
gvrocha at gmail.com