Advice on hostap with Red Hat 9 and/or Fedora Core 1?

[Mark G. Spencer]

Hello all,

I've been using the orinoco.cs driver with the monitor mode patch for my Prism/2 cards and it works well, doesn't require much configuration after a standard Red Hat 9 or Mandrake 9.2 installation.  (Less configuration the better, since I'm somewhat Linux challenged.)

I would like to try using hostap however.  I installed a hostap rpm on my Mandrake 9.2 laptop, and as far as I could tell, it didn't *do* anything and the hostap instructions didn't make sense as I was using an rpm.

So anyway .. I'm building a new laptop using either Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core 1.  Are there any special things I need to be aware of trying to get hostap running for a Prism/2 card on either of these?  Is there some kind of document that explains exactly what needs to be done to get hostap functional from a standard or full install of either RH or Fedora (basically, how do I kill the orinoco.cs driver that is running by default and replace it with hostap)?  I'm hoping the included documentation is enough, but I ran into nothing but pain trying to get wlan-ng working on any of my laptops.

Thanks for helping out the Linux challenged among you .. ;)

PS .. I would like to play with Fedora anyway, so if there are no major issues with hostap on that platform, I'll start burning the CD's.

Mark