linksys wireless-g (wpc54g) on Slack 10.2...how?

[gwpritch]

I've decided to enter the 21st Century and go wireless.
I have a Linksys wireless-g broadband router up and working on my XP desktop box (sorry...unavoidable for work) and I have bought a linksys wpc54G notebook adapter for my laptop running Slackware 10.2, but I honestly have no idea where to go from here to get my laptop configured and online. The LED's on the card are lit which I guess is a plus, but what next.
Even a pointer to a website would be appreciated...Thanks.

[je_fro]

well check and see if it's recognized with

lspci

and

dmesg | grep eth

other than that, you setup your init scripts to start ethX with DHCP...I don't remember much slackware stuff, but I think that script is /etc/rc.d/network

[Piko]

ndiswrapper if all else fails. I've used ndiswrapper with that model for years, and never had any trouble with it.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

I've used this with lots of wireless network cards that don't have Linux drivers.

[gwpritch]

I decided to go back to debian which I am somewhat more familiar with than slackware. So I decided to give kubuntu a try since there has been a lot of raving about it here.
I install and of course my wireless card was not configured.
I managed to find a compatible drive with ndiswrapper and after a false start or six I got the driver installed.

iwconfig gives me:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise Level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig contains not eth0 or wlan0 entries...only loopback

/etc/networking/interfaces contains entry for only the loopback device.

Where to I go from here?

[je_fro]

You add the entries that you need...

check out section 10.6.1.2 here:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-gateway.en.html

[gwpritch]

I tried that and tried configuring with a static address. 192.168.1.110

When I use the Wireless Lan Manager that comes with Kubuntu, and hit scanning for networks it complains no networks were found.
Could this be a problem with router configuration?
This is my first experience with a router and with manually configuring a networks so please bear with my stupidity.

dhcp3-client is installed btw.

thanks

[gwpritch]

ok I managed to get wlan0 configured and active (or so the Network software tells me) but I still can't reach a network. I also can't seem to change ESSID from off/any to linksys, the SSID of the router. Adding it to interfaces or using sudo iwconfig seems to have no effect.
I also tried setting up a static address rather than dhcp but still get a network unreachable 100% packet loss when trying to ping the router