Ok, after many interesting problems with mandrake 10.1 and sound and suse 9.2 and usb ports, I decided to do Mepis. Ok, it detected everything -except the winmodem- on my Gateway solo 9500 se ( PIII 900 512mb 30 gb hd ati rage mobility m4 ess allegro soundcard adaptec duoconnect usb2 and belkin 7 port usb hub-etc...) I did the ndis wrapper and the xp drivers and everything is as one would expect. However, even though I can get an access point mac address, even when I do get an ip address, I still can not get any network access. Kwifi says the connection is at full strength and iwconfig has the right essid and mac (for the access point) the right channel etc... about the only odd thing is that pump -i wlan0 works but always yields a failed operation.
I have both (netgear) ma111 and ma521 and the problem is common to both. any ideas? suggestions?
Please, other than recompile the kernel as mepis does not have the sources and it would seem it is excedingly difficult to add them. I have done kernels in other distros with mixed success but I really need to use the machine and for the time being I do not really have the time to experiment.

Thanks y'all

????Help????
doesn't anyone have any ideas? I imagine a number of you are as stumped as I am but I really could use some help

What error messages to you get exactly, what kind of ap are you connecting to, is it encrypted...?

sorry it took so long...thanks for replying....
no error messages have ever appeared, that is part of the problem. What I do get is kwifi and iwconfig and ifconfig saying I am connected while pump -i wlan0 returns "operation failed on wlan0" The network is the general student network in the library and to the best of my knowledge is not encripted. I have tested all the hardware components on a similar laptop running windoze xp and everything works with settings for an unencripted network. my next plan is to change the rules on the firewall from the defaults (guard dog) to see if it has any effects.

I've got the same problem, also using Mepis. I can connect to the AP, but I can't ping anything including the usual 192.168.1.1. What's screwy is that soemtimes it works just fine and others I can't seem to get anything to work. The other day it wasn't working and after switching ESSIDs several times it just seemed to start working on its own. This is extremely frustrating.