hey all,

Just started going to a new school which boasts wireless network connection anywhere on campus. I want to get my laptop on the network heres what i got
Mandrake 10.2 on compaq presario 2100
working belking 54g wireless adapter running with ndiswrapper(card connects at home to wep-encrypted network)
now i run iwlist scan and see the network
i set the essid
i run ifconfig wlan0 up
then i run dhclient to grab an ip but never get a response.
The professors werent much help and the it department charges a fee to set up wireless connectivity on a windows based pc, and dont know the first thing about linux. a fellow student said he was able to get on with his windows pc. he said the network is not encypted with a wep-key but rather LEAP authentication. he had to install a third party LEAP application to connect, where can i find a similar app for linux? i tried googleing it but the term leap shows too many non-relevant results and ive been sifting through but learned virtually nothing. i wasnt sure if this was more a network forum post or software forum post, so if a moderator feel it neccessary to move my thread than by all means...

thanks in advance for any responses

What you will need a supplicant. You can get xsupplicant, the open source option at http://www.open1x.org/ . Of course make sure that your card is on the supported hardware list before even downloading it and install the prerequisite OpenSSL - http://www.openssl.org/ . After you set the essid, did you run iwconfig again to look if it associated itself to an AP? On my school's Leap network I have to furnish a fake encription key to get associated. You could do that by running iwconfig eth0 key 999999999999; replacing eth0 by your actual wireless device. An example of a xsupplicant.conf file that should theoretically work would be:

#example of /etc/xsupplicant/xsupplicant.conf
#for LEAP protocol

network_list = all
#the list of networks to access

default_netname = default
#the default access network

logfile = /var/log/xsupplicant.log
#log file

myssid #here is your network id, may be listed in the network list
{
type = wireless
allow_types = all
identity = <BEGIN_ID>account<END_ID>
eap-leap {
username = <BEGIN_UNAME>account<END_UNAME>
password = <BEGIN_PASS>passwd<END_PASS>
}#setup for leap
}

Modify that file to fit your need and after you network interface has been associted you should run:
ifconfig eth0 up
xsupplicant -c /etc/xsupplicant.conf -i eth0 -f -d 4
replacing /etc/xsupplicant.conf and eth0 by those applicable to you system and you should be able to ping outside the network if everything went as planned.

Don't quote my config file, I haven't actualy tested it.