Please help!!!

I have a Dell 600m laptop with a truemobile 1300 b/g mini PCI wireless card.
OS is Mandrake 10
In installed ndiswrapper 0.10 and followed the instructions. I was sucessful at setting essid and key. The wireless light on my router lights up indicating that there is a wireless connection but when I try to access a web page it fails to load.

iwconfig -->
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"wireless"
Mode:Auto Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:90:4B:38:E9:92
Bit Rate:54Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key: (set) Security mode:restricted
Power Managementff
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-39 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:21671 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig -->
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:4B:12:98:FE
inet6 addr: fe80::290:4bff:fe12:98fe/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1726 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:35 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:104116 (101.6 Kb) TX bytes:7374 (7.2 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Memory:fafee000-fafeffff

[root@ jpgillivan]# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 hardware present

Thanks in advance

i am using ndiswrapper as well on one of my machines. after installing the ndiswrapper software and the windows driver i want it to use i type the following

modprobe ndiswrapper
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.2.111
route add defalt gw 192.168.2.1

note that i am using a wireless access point with an address of 192.168.2.1 - so you would probably want to change the values to match your access point. the 192.168.2.111 address is just a value i came up with, i was unsure of how to set up my machine to use dhcp, and with only 3 machines machines on the network, i didn't see much of a need to bother with dhcp !

and to /etc/resolv.conf i added

nameserver 192.168.2.1

i hope that helps, it's all i can recall about what i did to get wifi working on my machine at this time

Thanks, I will try that tonight.

I still need to be able to use DHCP because I use my laptop at school also. I cannot use a static IP address at school. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have looked at the network settings in the control panel and under the wireless tab: it displays my AP as a primary DNS server and it also lists 2 alternate. These were probably set when connected via ethernet cable.

Has anyone had any luck using any of the drivers that came installed with Mandrake for a Broadcom chip set?

I suppose that I could try to setup each one using io and irq settings. But I really don't want to go through 50+ drivers to try this.

Note: The internal Broadcom ethernet 1000 works fine.

after modprobe ndiswrapper

try

dhcpcd wlan0

Thats all I have to do....dont have to set up a gateway or anything, it just finds it....works great for my setup at home and at school.

I had a similar problem with my Latitude D600, using Mandrake 10.0 and the Linuxant driver.
After some email exchange with Jonathan from Linuxant, it appeared that I had two problems

1) The main issue was the shorewall firewall, which by default seems to allow only one interface to get through to the big wide world. To check if that is the case with you as well, open the file /etc/shorewall/interfaces . If the final lines look something like:

#ZONE INTERFACE BROADCAST OPTIONS
net eth0 detect
loc wlan0 detect

then it seems that wlan0 can't get through. To overcome this, change the "loc" on the line for "wlan0" to "net". And restart shorewall by (as root)

> service shorewall restart

Note that if you go into Mandrake Control Centre and change something in the firewall setup, you probably have to redo this change. Similarly when you do an update of shorewall.

2) The other problem was with routing. If you type "ip route", you can see the default route on the final line of the output. When you have two interfaces (e.g., ethernet and wireless) open at the same time, that seem to be a cause of problems. The solution I use is that I never have two interfaces active at the same time, and when changin between interfaces, I first shut down the running one before starting the other one.

Hope this is useful. Good luck!

Thanks for the post jvdh but my system does not have shorwall installed. I did not try the wireless connection with the ethernet cable connected at the same time. I will look at this later.

DementiaT - your suggestion worked but the command was "dhcpclient wlan0" (or "dhcpclient" probes all devices) - Thanks!

The problem now is that when I try to assign an essid that I have already tried, iwconfig will not allow me to do that. Is there a file that stores the previous essid's tried? Is there a command that wipes out all the previous entries?

Yeah!!

I found the answer to my problem. I used emacs to edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

I added the essid there and also set the key there.

Thanks for everyones help.

I made a mistake. the command is DHCLIENT not DHCPCLIENT. Anyway, it works. Anyone had luck with getting the modem to work?

Mr.JPGillivan,
mandrake 10 comes with ndiswrapper rpm. Can it not be used ? I also have dell 600m with same wifi. If you can write how to proceed step be step, it will be helpful to may users like me.