Whispers of R’lyeh

So I’ve been struggling with the eth5k drivers (and the madwifi alternative) on the tablet – both connect fine as long as my AP is unencrypted, but as soon as I add either WEP or WPA Personal security it just fails. In a last-ditch attempt to get wireless comms up, I’m installing the Windows XP network drivers into Linux using ndiswrapper.

Step Six: Installing ndiswrapper

apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

I’ve previously extracted the driver into /home/user/wireless

cd /home/user/wireless

ndiswrapper -i PRISMNIC.inf

modprobe ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -m

Followed by a reboot, picking a religion at random, and offering up a prayer.

It didn’t work.  However, I got a warning that /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper needed a .conf extension – so I quickly renamed and rebooted again…

Aaand still not working

To be continued…

I decided at the last moment to avoid NFS, because of the lack of security in its default form, and my lack of understanding of how to configure it in a more complicated way.

Also, CIFS mounts mean I only have to do this once, and my Windows machines can use it too

After adding a SAMBA share on the server, it was pretty easy to mount on the tablet:

Step Four: CIFS Mounts

First off, I needed to

apt-get install smbfs

to add the filesystem support.

Then it was just a matter of adding

//shire/media    /mnt/media    cifs    noauto,username=xxxx,password=xxxx,uid=1000,gid=1000

to the /etc/fstab file

Well, it’s been a while, but the site is back up and running. Now to start filling it from scratch.

Again