I'm attempting to try out Gentoo 1.4 on my home PC, using the LiveCD. The NIC in my PC is wireless, a Netgear MA311. After booting with the LiveCD, I check "ifconfig" to see if a card was picked up. The interface "wlan0" is defined: >> iwconfig wlan0 wlan0 IEEE 802.11-b Mode:Auto Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00 Encryption key:off My home network uses encryption, so I attempt to set my key on the device: >> iwconfig wlan0 enc AAAABBBBAB Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) : SET failed on device wlan0 ; Function not implemented. Here's output from lsmod: >> lsmod Module Size Used by Tainted: GF ohci1394 22792 0 (unused) ieee1394 40036 0 [ohci1394] tulip 39200 0 prism2_pci 58944 0 (unused) p80211 16332 1 [prism2_pci] floppy 47004 0 (autoclean) serial 48932 0 (autoclean) isa-pnp 28100 0 (autoclean) [serial] cloop 5520 1 usb-storage 59372 0 (unused) hid 12564 0 (unused) uhci 22944 0 (unused) ehci-hcd 14944 0 (unused) usbcore 55712 1 [usb-storage hid uhci ehci-hcd] It's apparent that the prism2_pci module is attempting to handle my wireless card, unsuccessfully though. I checked the distribution I currently use (Slackware 9.0), and there my network card is being handled by the "orinoco_pci" driver. This driver is not avaliable on the LiveCD. At one point I played around with the LiveCD on my work laptop as well. I'm not sure what kind of wireless card it had, but I got similar error messages whenever I tried setting the wireless key on it. My solution then was "rmmod prism2_cs ; modprobe orinoco_cs". Is it possible that these prism2 drivers are compiled incorrectly, or with incorrect support for certain cards? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot with the LiveCD 2. "iwconfig wlan0 enc [encryptionkey]" Actual Results: Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) : SET failed on device wlan0 ; Function not implemented. Expected Results: It should have set the wireless key on my card.
OK, apparently this is just my misunderstanding of the wlan drivers. They don't use "iwconfig" for configuration, but instead have their own configuration files which reside in /etc somewhere. These drivers are extremely difficult to configure. In the spirit of Gentoo, which is that the user should be allowed to pick and choose what he wants (not that Gentoo should force him to use any particular piece of software), I recommend that the "orinico_pci" driver (and dependent drivers, like "hermes") be included in the next LiveCD. For now, I'm marking this as "LATER". As far as I'm concerned, this is not fixed. But I do not have the authority or connections to get this driver put on the LiveCD at the moment.
