Where to start?

[Haldor Hartwig]

hi, I need help in getting my hostap driver to work, and i absolutely
don't know where to start though i read all the tutorials which can be
found on this subject... They unfortunately seem to adress the advanced
users only...
The only thing which i know is that i need to install hostap
driver in order to be able to use WPA encryption with my Prism chipset.
Is that correct?

Mandriva tells me that hostapd-0.5.5 and hostap-utils-0.4.7 (both
mandriva rpm packages) are installed.
Is hostapd-0.5.5 the driver or is the driver something else?

The system i use:
- Kernel version is 2.6.17-5mdv
- Network card is an intersil card and has Prism 2.5 (already did a
firmware flash to latest version to support WPA)
- wpa_supplicant 0.5.5 (mandriva rpm package) is installed.

[root at blubb etc]# wpa_supplicant -ieth3 -Dhostap
-c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
ioctl[PRISM2_IOCTL_HOSTAPD]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.

[root at blubb etc]# lsmod
orinoco_pci             5856  0 
orinoco                39636  1 orinoco_pci
hermes                  6976  2 orinoco_pci,orinoco

I'm confused, as i read different things: I need to compile kernel with
hostap support, i need to compile hostap (which one? hostap-driver?
hostapd? hostap-utils? all of these?) from source (and i need kernel
sources installed for this), i need to remove (rmmod) orinoco and hermes
modules and so on...

Would be nice if someone would help me to get things in the right order.
Haldor