[ale] Debian & Wireless help...

[Kevin Krumwiede]

I'm new to Debian and wireless networking at the same time.  I've
successfully installed Woody on my laptop, but I have yet to get the
wlan-ng drivers to build.  (Or build and install a kernel, for that
matter -- something I consider routine on RH.)  I'm hoping I'll have
things sorted out by tomorrow night when I head out to the coffee house
with my new WPC11v3.  I doubt anyone at the coffee house knows their
SSID or anything like that.  Will I need any special tools to discover
these things, or will it "just work" the way it apparently does in
Windows?

Here's a rundown of the problems I'm having:

I tried using make-kpkg kernel-image.  The resulting .deb contained the
kernel but no modules.  On subsequent attempts (with a freshly untarred
source tree) I used the standard make dep/make clean/make modules/make
modules_install/make install.  I still didn't get any modules.  I tried
again, changing a few modules and being extra careful with my
configuration this time, and now it won't build at all; something about
undefined symbols.  I should have written down exactly what it was, but
building a kernel takes a couple hours on my laptop (P166/48MB) so I'm
not going to do it again right now.  I'm using gcc-2.95.  Should I
install 3.x?  How do I do that on Debian?  My attempts at upgrading
anything have so far resulted in disaster...

I then tried building linux-wlan-ng against kernel-headers-2.4.18-bf2.4,
but I get a warning from make config that the headers are for "kernel
version ." and the resulting module contains no version info and will
not load even with -f.  I guess you need an actual configured kernel
tree to build the wlan drivers.  Where do I get the source for -bf2.4? 
apt-get isn't listing it among the candidates for kernel-source.


Thanks,
Krum