After much investigation, I've finally got Wifi working in my new machine. There were 2 serious problems : the firmware had been updated to a new version number (7961 from 7921), which I was able to find in System Rescue /lib/firmware (it wasn't in the latest Gentoo firmware pkg).
Then many tries failed to get Wpa-supplicant to start via RC : every time, it failed to start because it couldn't find an interface (the failure seems to be due to Udev/Dhcpcd/W-S tripping over one another). Finally, I removed it from the default runlevel & started it after boot + login via 'rc-service ... start'. There's a 15 sec delay, then 'ip a' shows carrier + IP numbers (it doesn't change the name from 'wlan0', but that doesn't matter). I've aliased the start command as 'wifi' in /root/.bashrc , which allows an easy start-up after every reboot (I insist on long-standing UNIX procedure & do all system management in a root console). The w-p conf file I'm using is as simple as cb , showing only SSID PSK priority . This is a desktop system in the basement of a downtown house : the Wifi server is upstairs over my head. FYI for anyone else who finds her/himself stuck in this way. -- ========================,,============================================ SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
