Hey all. I'm a Linux newbie. I thought I was computer literate until I switched, but heh....I sure do have a lot to learn I've found. I love Linux and have no desire to give it up, but if I can't get my WiFi card to work, I'll have very little choice.

The basics:

I'm running Mandrake/Mandriva Linux LE 2005 with kernel version 2.6.11 and have applied all updates from Mandriva. /sbin/lspci does not exist according to Linux. My computer is a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop.

Okay...so here's the scoop. I NEED my WiFi access to get onto the internet and get work done. So I hooked up directly and went through Graham's excellent guide to install madwifi into Linux, as I have been told that the madwifi supports cards with the Atheros chipset...which includes my Netgear WG511T cardbus made in Taiwan. Before I installed the driver, my card flashed with one light (of two), which tells me there is no communication with the computer. Now, however, after I installed the driver, the card will flash its two lights on and off out of sync, which means searching for wireless network. Problem is that, even with such a strong network around me in my home, Linux refuses to make contact with my card; the Mandrake control center comes up blank when I open it, and will not find a network, and I can't tell if it is properly communicating with my card or not. I went and fiddled with network setting in the control center, telling Mandrake to set up a new wireless network, and I tried to configure it manually in those settings. Sadly, all that did was slow my boot to a crawl (in verbose load I can see it is trying to run through a connection process with our network and failing, reverting to my ethernet card where, again, nothing happens [there obviously]). I can assure that our network is just fine; I can get onto my network just fine in Windows. I have a WEP 128 bit encryption, but nothing anything more advanced. I think it says something that my card appears to be searching for a network now that madwifi is installed, but I need it to find one, and it just won't do it under Linux (I imagine its in Linux and not the card itself). Any ideas? HELP!!!!

Never setup this card but things to start with is turn off encryption on the router. Turn off any firewall or iptables scripts on the machine.

Brian1

Done...I never turned a firewall on to begin with. In the meantime, nothing changed. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

Hi,
I have a netgear wg511t working on my Inspiron 8500 running debian, so maybe I can help. I imagine you may either have it working by now or have given up, but maybe this'll be useful for someone else. Instead of going through the gui I configured manually with the command line using iwlist, iwconfig and ifconfig and then dhclient to get an ip address from the router. Of course this means that until I set up a start up script I'll have to through the whole thing every time I reboot, but yes, I haven't come to that bit yet.

Here goes:

First check madwifi is doing its stuff:

ifconfig ath0

If you get a device not found, then madwifi may not be installed correctly, or your wifi card uses another address.

Next:

iwconfig ath0 key xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx enc on

I use a 128-bit key, but yours might be shorter. See here: http://www.madwifi.net/Install-HOWTO...-Key-HOWTO.txt

Use the following command to check the correct key is in use:

iwlist key

Then bring up ath0 using ifconfig (if it's not up already):

ifconfig ath0 up

Now scan for your router:

iwlist ath0 scan

If all goes well you'll get something which includes this:

ath0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:E0:98:46:77:E0
ESSID:"lamb"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
Quality=12/94 Signal level=-83 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Encryption keyn
Bit Rate:1 Mb/s
Bit Rate:2 Mb/s
Bit Rate:5 Mb/s
Bit Rate:6 Mb/s
Bit Rate:9 Mb/s
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s
Bit Rate:12 Mb/s
Bit Rate:18 Mb/s
Bit Rate:22 Mb/s
Bit Rate:24 Mb/s
Bit Rate:36 Mb/s
Bit Rate:48 Mb/s
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=200

For drama's sake, uplug your ethernet cable with a sweeping gesture at this point, then run dhclient (I have a fuzzy memory that mandrake uses something different to get ip addresses from dhcp, but yes, the effect would be the same) to get an ip address.

Once acheived, try pinging your router and then an internet site to see if you're connected to the outside world. I found that although I could ping the router I could not at first reach the outside world. Running:

iwlist ath0 scan

again seemed to help. For a more detail description of commands to do various things, look here:

http://www.madwifi.net/Install-HOWTO...nfig-Howto.txt

Hope that helps, good luck!