I have an IBM Thinkpad T43, and I have no Idea ho to turn on the wi-fi radio under any of these live cd distros.

My notebook has no switch for the radio. Under XP it is accessible via Fn + F5, then the IBM software control opens.

How can I turn on the radio under linux?


Centrino Chipset
2200 A/B/G Card

Thanks

What flavors are you using?

Lets see if it knows your card is there:

At a command prompt type:

iwconfig

If you get output like this you're good to go:

eth0 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:"willy"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:12:17:BE:FF:03
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm Sensitivity=20/200
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption keyff
Link Quality=208/0 Signal level=-48 dBm Noise level=-148 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0


On most bootable Linux versions there is a WaveLan configuration available from the menue somewhere. In there you need to set your SSID and encryption.

Once that is done, go through the netcard configuration to set the IP and you should be on the network.

Mike K.

Damn Small Linux
PHLAK
Mandrake Move

Are the ones I have tried

charon79m

iwconfig spits this out

I am currently using Damn Small Linux

It has a few choices in the menu:

netcardconfig
iwconfig
wlancardconfig
ndiswrapper
prism2

both netcardconfig and wlancardconfig spit out a similar message: No supported ...

iwconfig, ndiswrapper and prism2 all give me options to specify channel wep, etc.

There is an indicator under the screen when the radio is on. I can probably get ndiswrapper or pism2 to work if I could just get the radio to turn on.


If you have any suggestions let me know.


Thanks

Well, the DSL version you are using is not seeing your wireless card at all. You'll need to research the card in that laptop and probably get the drivers from elsewhere... Yeah, how are you going to download them when you don't have network access. You may need to use the ndiswrapper to use the Windows driver under linux to get this to work.

You might try another bootable linux variant to see if it can tell you what card you have. Knoppix proper and all the variants of it work great for hardware detection.

You might also post this in the wirelss networking seciton for some assistance.

MrKnisely

I actually have a similar problem. I'm using DSL on a Gateway (centrino) laptop with an Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 mini PCI card. I get the "no wireless extensions" when running the iwconfig command. When I boot with the Ubuntu Live cd it detects my WiFi card just fine. Any ideas?

What Linux live cd distro would run well on a computer with a Pentium 2 Processor (350 megahurts), 64 mb of ram, and Nvidia Video Card?

I've been having a lot of fun with Ubunto. It seems to be quite stable.

www.ubuntulinux.org

Did the wifi work using the livecd?

My WiFi worked fine with the Ubuntu Live CD but not with DSL. Although, I never tried the Live CD version of DSL. I'm running DSL off of my USB keychain drive. Which is really awesome by the way (except for the fact that my WiFi isn't working...). I wouldn't think there'd be a difference between the USB keychain version and the Live CD verision but I'll give it a try.

I'm having pretty much the same problem as digitalgravy.

The laptop is X41. lspci detects the card perfectly- Intel 2200BG. All the necessary kernel options are compiled in. If I only knew how to turn on wifi. As digitalgravy said, in windows it's available with fn+f5. In linux, as no software drivers intervene, fn+f5 just toggles bluetooth. I can also control all the lights, brighnesses, bluetooth ect from /proc/acpi but not wifi. I also copied the necessary firmware to /lib/firmware but it didn't change anything, I still think I have to turn it on first : )).

Can anyone help please?

I solved it. It helped when I compiled the ipw2200 kernel option as a module.