Hey,

I currently ave no home internet connection, meaning that I tend to use my laptop for wireless a lot. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting this to work in Linux.

I am running Slackware 11 2.4 bareacpi on a Toshiba Sat. P4 2.4. A while back I got one of those $10 truckstop.net wifi cards off of eBay. It works fine in Windows, but I ended up needing to use ndiswrapper to get it working in Linux. NDIS reports that the card is fully functional, and I have a "wlan0" device in KDE's Network Settings, but even when KWifiManager reports 5/5 bars, Firefox will not go anywhere. I like to consider myself a knowledgable computer user, but even after a few hours of Googling/LQ-Searching, I'm stumped.

If anyone could assist me, that would be appreciated. I only use the internet about once a week, though, so this could be a little drawn out.

Are you getting a dhcp address?

<<snip>>
The line starting with inet addr is the one you are looking for. Yours will be different but should be there with an ip.

If your machine is set for dhcp and that line is not there or incorrect try running dhclient or dhcpd (not sure which slack uses).

What happens when you as root;
iwlist wlan0 scanning
pick one
iwconfig essid "xxxxxx"
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhcpcd wlan0

This topic might get more attention in the Slackware forum, or possibly even in Wireless Networking.

Anyway, it sounds like you aren't getting proper DNS information, but it is impossible to say without a bit more testing.

I don't know much about KDE's network configuration dialogs, so I will be telling you how to do this all from the command line. If that is a problem for you, I am sure somebody with more KDE experience could fill in the blanks.

I also assume you are connecting under Windows to get online. If that is the case, then you will want to write down the information you are getting from the network you are connecting to under Windows, and take a look at how that compares to Linux.

Under Windows, go so Start->Run, and then type in "cmd". Then run "ipconfig /all". Take down the important information for your wireless device, mainly IP address, gateway, and DNS.

Now boot into Slackware and connect as you have been doing. Since you are using the same WLAN card under Windows and Linux, the network's DHCP server should be giving you the same information under both OS's.

You will want to use "ifconfig" to find out your current TCP/IP information. Make sure the IP for "wlan0" matches (or is at least similar) to that which you got from the Windows side.

To check your default gateway, use the command "route". In the output of this command, the last line should say "default" on the left, and the IP address listed should match what you wrote down.

Finally, you will want to verify that the DNS information is correct. Do to that, run "cat /etc/resolv.conf". This will print out a text file which should list the DNS servers that your computer was given. They will be in the form of "nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx". Verify these match the known good information.

Now, one or more of those is probably going to be wrong, which is why you can't get online. Figure out which one doesn't match what you were getting under Windows, and we will be able to tell you what needs to be done to get it working.

If none of that is wrong...well, then this should be pretty interesting to troubleshoot.

Thank you for all the responses, guys! I will be on the internet again sometime this week (Thursday-ish...), so I will try to post the asked information then.

Hmm, ok, whenever I try to set options (essid, key, etc) with iwconfig, I am told that I can't becuase the options are invalid.

What does your command look like? It should be in the form:

iwconfig wlan0 essid MYESSID

You get errors from that? What about using whatever GUI KDE uses for wireless configuration, does that work?

I'm getting errors when I use iwconfig, not GUI's. The GUI does nothing.

Here's what happens when I...

I don't see the errors.