# Does the kernel off the live cd support wireless or not?=not

## turtles

Does the kernel off the live cd support wireless or not?

In particular ndiswrapper.

thanks

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## NeddySeagoon

turtles,

No.  No liveCDs can support ndiswrapper directly as the Windows XP drivers required are not under the GPL.

Knoppix provides ndiswrapper but you have to arrange your own WindowsXP drivers to actually use it.

Knoppix provides all the tools you need to do a manual Gentoo install, if thats what you want to do.

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## turtles

Thanks for the reply   :Very Happy: 

I guess I need to rephrase.

Assuming that anywhere the installer ask about wireless the yes option was selected.

If one installs the genkernel generic kernel from the live cd, completes the install as per handbook is it necessary to recompile the kernel before emerging ndiswrapper or other wireless configuratioin.

thanks again turtles

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## NeddySeagoon

turtles,

The installer does not ask about wireless. Its doesn't support it so it doesn't ask.

ndiswrapper builds against the kernel. It needs the sources installed at /usr/src/linux and required that they be configured.

The installer does not provide any kernel sources, so the answer to you question is that you need the kernel sources and ndiswrapper to build ndiswrapper. I have a feeling that you need to select some options manually in the kernel too, so that means you need to compile and install a kernel.

It looks like you need sneakernet to get the required files onto gentoo.

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## turtles

Thanks again

I do have access to a the net via a LAN and I have never had a problem with live cd's or the new live CD GUI installer. It uses genkernel to make a kernel like a live cd kernel.

I am wondering if that generic kernel supports ndiswrapper without additional kernel recompiling? I am pretty shure it gave me the opurtunity to do somthing like menuconfig where there is an option for wireless support which I enabled. 

Nice tip about the networkless install though.

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## turtles

 *Quote:*   

> The installer does not provide any kernel sources, so the answer to you question is that you need the kernel sources and ndiswrapper to build ndiswrapper. I have a feeling that you need to select some options manually in the kernel too, so that means you need to compile and install a kernel. 

 

I think this is correct, although when I first tried ndiswrapper after using GUI installer it showed "hardware dectected" and my wireless card also displayed in lspci? I guess since the kernel sources were not there is why it did not work.

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## NeddySeagoon

turtles,

lspci reads the PROM from the card and looks up the Vendor and Device IDs in a database.

It displays what it finds there, or (Unknown Device) if the database is out of date.

lspci -n shows you numbers.

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## turtles

Interesting so lspci is not a good indicator of weather the card will work or not?

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## NeddySeagoon

turtles,

No, not at all - its just a database.

However, given the data from lspci (in either form) you can feed it to google and thats a very good indicator.

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