Need a wireless client for Fedora 8

jonrpick · 05-09-2008, 03:30 AM

As the thread title says, I need some way of scanning available wireless networks under Fedora 8.

"iwlist" doesn't return any results. Strange, when considering that I'm typing this on my Fedora 8 laptop, WIRELESSLY!

When I run iwlist, I get "No scan results".

At home, it's not a big deal, as I know my SSID, but if I want to connect anywhere else, it's obviously a problem.

Can anyone give me a recommendation as to which app to install?? Are my wireless settings incorrect, and that's why I'm getting the "No scan results" error???

TIA...

raskin · 05-09-2008, 05:10 AM

Do you run "iwlist scan" as root?

pixellany · 05-09-2008, 09:24 AM

If your interface is--eg--wlan0, you need:
iwlist wlan0 scan

What I have noticed is that the scan will sometimes not return the same info on every attempt. Weak signals obviously could cause that, but I've seen it happen on the stronger ones.

If you are connected using wireless, then there is no issue in your settings.

I don't like ANY of the wireless GUI tools--I'm getting ready to write my own simple script using the basic CLI wireless tools.

raskin · 05-09-2008, 12:51 PM

Well, "iwlist scan" for user can read the last scan result. For root it should initiate a new scan, but usually doesn't do that unless ~30s elapsed since previous search.

jonrpick · 05-09-2008, 01:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raskin

Do you run "iwlist scan" as root?

Hmm...

I'll double-check, but I'm 99% sure I did.

jonrpick · 05-09-2008, 01:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pixellany

If your interface is--eg--wlan0, you need:
iwlist wlan0 scan

What I have noticed is that the scan will sometimes not return the same info on every attempt. Weak signals obviously could cause that, but I've seen it happen on the stronger ones.

If you are connected using wireless, then there is no issue in your settings.

I don't like ANY of the wireless GUI tools--I'm getting ready to write my own simple script using the basic CLI wireless tools.

The command I ran was "iwlist eth1 scan". It returned no results.

I tried PCLinuxOS on the laptop for a while. I was *ok* but not great. It did have a good wireless client built-in though that showed all available wireless networks within range.

jonrpick · 05-11-2008, 12:27 PM

I tried again as root... "No scan results".

Ideas?

Edit: 5 minutes later, no changes whatsoever, and it suddenly worked.

NO idea why that is. But it picked up my LAN as well as a neighbor's router.

Quote:

eth1 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:06:25:F7

1:E4
ESSID:"pickens"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Signal level:-72 dBm Noise level:-101 dBm
Encryption key

n
Extra: Last beacon: 157ms ago
Cell 02 - Address: 00:17:3F:BF:44:F9
ESSID:"The Palace 1176"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Signal level:-90 dBm Noise level:-94 dBm
Encryption key

n
Extra: Last beacon: 13064ms ago

raskin · 05-11-2008, 12:34 PM

What wireless card do you use? It is possible that Fedora (in its useful effort to promote free drivers) supplies a free driver, but your card is not fully reverse-engineered yet; and PCLinuxOS gave you just ndiswrapper and a Windows driver inside ndiswrapper's compatibility sandbox (which worked).

jonrpick · 05-11-2008, 02:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raskin

What wireless card do you use? It is possible that Fedora (in its useful effort to promote free drivers) supplies a free driver, but your card is not fully reverse-engineered yet; and PCLinuxOS gave you just ndiswrapper and a Windows driver inside ndiswrapper's compatibility sandbox (which worked).

It's an Orinoco chipset, 802.11b PCMCIA card (2Wire branded). These are pretty good cards. A lot of the testing we did when I worked in a Lab for AT&T involved using Orinoco-based cards as a baseline.

This is the only card I've used that's worked across the board on every distro of Linux that I've tried, all the way down to Puppy v2.14.