I managed to find an AP that was open and I could connect to, the ssid was "NETGEAR".

I always set up my ssh vpn first, so that all traffic is encrypted, it's too easy to sniff the traffic going across an open wlan.

Anyway, after checking my email across the vpn, and a bit of browsing, during which time I had to keep the laptop perfectly still, and in a very uncomfortable position, or else the wlan connection would drop out, I wondered about using the spare AP I intended to install openAP on, in client mode.

I was thinking, that if I could get openap to run as a client, then I could carry the ap around (it's almost small enough), fit a high gain aerial on it, and stick it in the window when I go places, and run a length of cat5 to my laptop, to save me holding my laptop in stupid positions.

I googled around a bit, and browsed through the doco off openap. I had to use a backup, here, since the original pages are gone (and have been for ages).

I also found a page about linuxap, here, which is a newer spinoff project of openap.

While browsing, I kept seeing references to needing a 3.3V SRAM card to flash the AP, and this wasn't sitting right. It finally dawned on me, when I put the SRAM card in my laptop, it comes up as a 5V card.

Crap. I then recalled reading something about a guy using a 5V card, he had to stick 5V on the VCC pin of the PCMCIA header in the AP.

I found where this was, in a pdf file, which I think you can find here.

The pdf is supposed to have a picture showing how to put 5V on the 3.3V line, but it's missing from the PDF.

I suppose, that if I ever get the card to work in linux, so I can write on it, that I'll just have to research the pinouts of a PCMCIA controller, and stick 5V on the supply line.