Automatic Wireless WPA Authentication

[Frank Hahn]

I have a Gateway 7510GX laptop with one of the dreaded Broadcom wireless 
cards. This is using Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 and the ndiswrapper driver for the 
network card.

I have been able to get the card to connect and authenticate with 
wpa_supplicant but I have to do it manually.

If I type at the command line:

# wpa_supplicant -D ndiswrapper -i eth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -d

I can watch the software authenticate to my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. 
I can then type:

# dhclient eth1

and then receive an IP address, DNS IP's, etc.

If I use NetworkManager to try and automate this, it never authenticates 
with the router. I can watch syslog and it will try several times and then 
give up. I have everything in /etc/network/interface commented out except 
for the loopback device.

I am not sure where to install a default wpa_supplicant.conf file. The 
documentation that gets installed does not make it clear. Reading through 
/etc/wpa_supplicant/ifupdown.sh does not help.

In /proc/net/ndiswrapper/ there is a directory called wlan0 but in 
/etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper I have the statement:

alias eth1 ndiswrapper

Any further ideas on where to head from here?

Thanks.

-- 
Frank Hahn