Debian Etch wpa_supplicant

[Robert Fritz]

Hi there,

I got my Omnibook 6000 with WPC54Gv4 wireless adapter working with WPA... but I'm not sure why it works... theories welcome.

Basically on Debian sarge, I'd used ndiswrappers, and wpa_supplicant. That same configuration no longer worked on etch(kernel 2.6.17)... I got errors like "usable to associate with driver" from the wpa_supplicant daemon. What finally worked was to change the driver reference to wpa_supplicant to "-Dwext" ... referring to the native wireless kernel driver instead... When I then removed ndis wrappers, my set-up stopped working, and it started working again only when I reinstalled ndiswrappers.

So my question is: if I'm using the native kernel wireless extensions, I shouldn't need ndiswrappers, if otoh, I'm using ndiswrappers, i should be able to point wpa_supplicant to that driver (like I could back on 2.6.8/sarge). What gives?

[Bryan Eley · Accepted solution]

Robert,

I think if you're entering something like
ifconfig wlan0 up wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd

the -Dwext (generic wireless extension) is invoking whatever wireless driver your system thinks it should have. So, if you don't have a native WPC54Gv4 linux firmware/driver installed, then it would make sense that after having already installed ndiswrapper. -Dwext is in fact invoking the ndiswrapper module and WPA_supplicant fails when you remove it, since it appears that no other functional wireless driver exists.

For example, see http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/WPA