Intel 5100 wifi driver debian lenny
 

I have an Acer Aspire 6930 laptop that I'm setting up for my wife with Debian Lenny. It has an Intel 5100 wireless card. I'd like to get a driver for the card without having to install a new kernel. Any suggestions?

This page from Intel says that support for the 5100 chipset is included in kernels newer than 2.6.24, so you shouldn't need to upgrade. Have you installed Lenny yet? You should be able to use the NetworkManager applet to change any settings in order to bring up the wireless interface.

Lenny doesn't even know the card exists. It doesn't show up with ifconfig or lspci.

What is the output of lspci? And I think you need to use iwconfig instead of ifconfig. If I recall, wireless interfaces won't necessarily show up in ifconfig.

This thread suggests that you might need to ensure you're broadcasting an a/b/g signal as well as an n signal, but it sounds like you're having lower level problems.

It's not in iwconfig or lspci; I checked those before I posted here. It simply doesn't exist. I had Squeeze on there briefly the other day and it worked, but I'm extremely uncomfortable with using an experimental distribution on a production machine. I also know that both Mint and Mandriva recognize the card.

I'd like to revive this thread. I finally bowed to the inevitable and installed the 2.6.29 kernel on the laptop. So far no disasters. After running modprobe iwlagn the wireless card is finally being recognized but it isnt finding any networks. Here is the output of iwconfig:

Any ideas?

I'm going to bump this thread. Does anyone have any ideas? This is a mobile laptop; I've got to solve this.

Have you tried anything beyond checking the output of iwconfig? If you are using a graphical desktop, you should be able to get it working with NetworkManager, which is invoked with a widget in the 'system tray' or whatever you call the corner of the screen that usually contains the clock.

Are you doing this debugging routine on a wireless network you administer? Are you using an unsecured hot spot type connection? Or are you trying to connect to a secure network you have permission to access? The first and third situations are similar, but in the second case you might need to find out some characteristics of the wifi signal with the iwlist command:

iwlist wlan0 scanning

That will tell you the essid and the channel/frequency of any wireless networks in range. After that, either use NetworkManager or the iwconfig command to get the adapter and the router talking to each other. I got hung up one time by not giving iwconfig enough information, so specify everything you know: essid, channel/frequency (just one or the other), wep key and mode, at least. If you're trying to use WPA security, unfortunately I can't help you.

How did you know that a newer kernel would get Lenny to recognize your adapter, by the way?

I found it out by doing a lot of google searching; I'm not the only person that's run into this problem.

As for the rest, I've already tried most of it. I think I've got a misplaced file somewhere because of the following:

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out what it is, where it is, or where it goes.

The following link goes into detail how to use that particular Intel wireless device:

http://wiki.debian.org/iwlagn

You may also find the following link useful:

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAcerOne

You would save yourself and others a lot of time if you gave more details about what you've tried and what information you've gathered. In your first post you come off like a confused noob, but in fact you have a fair idea of what you're doing and are just too impatient to explain yourself. Good luck.

Sorry, dude. I know just enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what information will be useful. I'll try to be more thorough in the future.

Anyway, regarding the state of my wifi: turns out the firmware in the lenny repos didn't cover my card so I got the backports one and it got me a bit further down the road. I don't get an error message when I try to bring the card up and I can manually scan and locate my wireless network. It's still not autodetecting, and I can't get an IP address via DHCP. Even with a manual ip address and card configuration I can't ping my gateway. Any ideas?