Netgear WG511T Wireless card in Mandrake 10.1

After lots of google work, and attempts with a Linksys WPC54G and a D-link DWL-G630, I ended up trying a Netgear WG511T. A number of people said that those worked fine with the madwifi kernel packages available with 10.1's PowerPack. When I tried it I got messages about athpci and madwifipci modules not being available, even though I see the module files on my system. I also got a message when installing the madwifi kernel package that said I needed to *rebuild* my kernel with dkms. How is it that others had such smooth sailing with the same card and OS version? What could I be doing wrong?

As for the WPC54G, I saw that I'd need to run with the ndiswrapper. I followed the Mandrake 10.1 specific instructions to remove the old ndiswrapper kernel module, remove the old version of ndiswrapper, rebuild the kernel with the new (1.0) ndiswrapper module, rebuild a the version of ndiswrapper and install it. I got as far as ndiswrapper acknowledging that the driver and hardware were present. But, I never could get the kernel module to load. modprobe complained about the kernel version and kernel source version (at build time I presume) not being of the same version. This looks to me like a problem with Mandrake's kernel naming convention. My laptop won't boot with kernel-2.6.8.1.12mdk. Instead it requires kernel-i586-up-1GB-2.6.8.1.12mdk to boot. modprobe specificly and the kernel-i586-up-1GB-2.6.8.1.12mdk. I even tried ndiswrapper's contributed make-kernel-patch script to build a patch against kernel source before building it -- I did this with Mandrake kernel source RPMs (2.6 and 2.4) and with a 2.6.10 vanilla kernel.

I'm pretty patient and strive to get things working. But, wireless sure seems pretty hard to get working. I'm going to try a card listed inetc-pcmcia-config next. That *has* to be supported; well at least the "color glossy" says so.

Sigh....

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