# No wlan0 interface on Gentoo after installation.

## shaunsingh14

Hello all. I've had many issues with the Gentoo minimal installation CD, where I couldn't get my wireless card detected. But, seeing as how the Gentoo installation involved chrooting and "breaking away" from the main environment (so-to-speak), I decided to do the Gentoo installation from my Arch Linux partition, seeing as how I have some extra space left over on my hard drive. After a brief stint with GRUB, I finally managed to get Arch and Gentoo on the same HDD. There's only one problem. There's no wlan0 interface. 

Here's what showed up after running iwconfig: 

eth0 no extensions 

lo no extensions

Any ideas? 

I also used genkernel to compile the kernel, as I'm not very comfortable with making my own kernel (I tried it once, and my filesystems weren't detected), if that helps.

EDIT: Silly me, I forgot to list the model. 

It's a Linksys WUSB54GC v3. I'm currently relying on my old Netgear card to work, and it's a bit of a slow one. lol

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## NeddySeagoon

shaunsingh14,

To get this information, you can use any distro.

Plug in your wireless dongle, or if its built in, run 

```
lsusb
```

and find the line that tells about your wireless. Something like 

```
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501/RT2573 Wireless Adapter
```

For linux, we don't care much about the vendor and vendors model number, the vendor and device IDs, thats the 148f:2573, in my example, identify the hardware inside your device.

You will need to build some kernel modules, find some firmware and fet some userspace program(s) to make your wireless work.

The kernel and firmware we can identifiy from your lsusb output, your userspace programs depend on the encryption you want to use over the wireless link.

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## Gusar

A quick google tells me the thing is 1737:0077 and should work with the rt2800usb driver. So make sure you have rt2800usb as a module and install the linux-firmware package (or the rt2870-firmware package could also work).

But in general NeddySeagoon is right, we're not interested in the marketing name, "lspci -nn" or "lsusb" output is what we want to see, because it's the pci-id or usb-id that matter.

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## NeddySeagoon

shaunsingh14,

The problem is than many vendors use the same marketing name, model number and glossy packaging but change the guts of the device, so its not the same thing at all. In such cases the device ID should change.  I say 'should' not will, as there are a few vendors who have overlooked the deviceID change.

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