Driver Installation Ubuntu kernel 2.6.17 Basic Help

[ahuguet at cttc.es]

> None of which would be something you would do with Linux 2.6.17. With
> this kernel version (and any other recent 2.6 version for that matter),
> you will need to build Host AP driver as part of the kernel build. If
> you are using a generic distro kernel (i.e., from Ubuntu in this case),
> the Host AP driver may already be included and would not need to be
> installed separately. If that is not the case, you may want to follow
> whatever mechanism the distro uses for configured and building the
> kernel.


Indeed I'm using Ubuntu "out of the cage".
I'd say the way Ubuntu has to deal with this packages, in order to have
them properly installed in the system is through Synaptic Package Manager.
Making a search on it with "hostap" returned results for:

hostapd
hostap-source
hostap-utils

It seems to me the proper package to install is the hostap-source, and
will use Synaptics in order to do so.

I've read, on other websites that there might be conflict with drivers,
and that maybe it's needed to blacklist certain drivers in order to make
the system use HostAP driver for the card, and no other.

What is the way to ensure the system is using the HostAP driver, on a
given device?

How can I know what driver version is being used by the device in
question, once I've told the system to use only HostAP with said device?
I'm saying this because Synaptic shows HostAP-source version as:
1:0.4.1-1
I understand this would be version 1.0.4.1, cause version 0.4.9 is marked
as old stable release and should not be used with new kernels.

Thanks again for your help.