Playing with ndiswrapper

Very impressed so far. Purchased a Dick Smith XH8227 802.11g USB network adapter as they were on closeout for a reasonable price. There are efforts to get a driver going natively using the prism54.org drivers as a base but I wanted to get things up and going quickly.

Got confused at first as I loaded the PCI drivers into ndiswrapper first and then couldn’t figure out why it couldn’t find the card. It came up quite quickly from there. My /etc/network/interfaces ended up being:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo wlan0
iface lo inet loopback

# This is a list of hotpluggable network interfaces.
# They will be activated automatically by the hotplug subsystem.
mapping hotplug
        script grep
        map eth0

# The primary network interface
iface eth0 inet static
      address 192.168.2.2
      netmask 255.255.255.0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
      wireless-key <secret>
      wireless-essid Call<secret>
      hostname squishy

Added mdnsresponder to squishy and now I can ping squishy from my iBook. Added libnss-mdns and edited /etc/nsswitch.conf to have hosts: files dns mdns4 and now I can ping crush.local from squishy. Nice. No DNS server incolved.