# Wireless Networking - any advice before I start ? [SOLVED]

## perini

Installed Gentoo very easily (followed the install guide).  Then I installed the KDE desktop easily enough (followed the install guide - a hiccup here and there) . . . . . (unfortunately several months back when I first installed 'X', with much needed help from the community, I asked if installing gnome or kde would have installed 'X' automatically - someone said, yes).  Needless to say, I installed kde and it didn't work, so I did installed 'X' (once again, help from the community) - desktop working and I'm happy.

About to start installation of my wireless adapter / network (read the guide) - is there any preliminary installations or advice that should be considered (ndiswrapper, etc) before I start with; wireless-tools or wpa_supplicant ???

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

TomPLast edited by perini on Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## NeddySeagoon

perini,

All the window managers install Xorg for you but none of them can configure it, so it mostly doesn't work until you get an xorg.conf that suits you, your pointer device(s) and your display device(s).

You should use native Linux drivers and wpa_supplicant if you can.

The drivers depend on your chipset - are there any native drivers ?

wpa_supplicant provides better security but all devices on your wireless network need to be able to use it.

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## perini

By native, do you mean from the manuf ?

this is my w/less adpt:

02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03) (Dell m600)

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## NeddySeagoon

perini,

By native, I mean linux drivers, rather than windows drivers and ndiswrapper. Broadcom has some linux drivers but I've not tried them.

I understand they will be added to the Linux kernel fairly soon.

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## perini

I found this for the 43xx linux drivers:

www.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-dev

I'm not sure who they are or if I can trust it.  Any knowledge of this site??

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## NeddySeagoon

perini,

Your link gives a 404 not found error but kernel.org is the home of the Linux kernel, so you can trust it as much as you trust your kernel.

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## GNUtoo

from http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=devices

```
4309     PCI/Cardbus     Unstable (802.11a unsupported, work in progress)
```

so you should better use ndiswrapper or the lastest code from wireless-dev

by the way the windows drivers aren't audited(for security) nor maintained so as soon as you can switch to a free software driver do it

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## perini

Thanks for the advice.  Been waiting to post before trying fw-cutter, but emerge telling me it's masked and the handbook telling me not to umask it.  I'll do the ndiswrapper.

Thanks again for the assistance,

TomP

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