Hi everyone,

I have a little issue with the ipw2200 wireless driver on my Dell Latitude d600 laptop (Fedora Core 2). At the end of a long and educational nightmare, I managed to get the firmware and the driver to load. I can even connect through my inexq wireless router.
However, I need to load the driver every time I boot FC2, and once I load it, I can not open any new applications at all. So if I want to surf the net, I need to open a mozilla browser before I load the drivers.
I've found one other post with a similar issue on google, but there was no useful reply to that part of the problem.
Does anyone know why that happens and how to fix it? And what do I need to do in order to load the driver once for good?

Thanks!
Jheffy

Could you post some of the errors you get when you try to start a new program? Also, it might be worth looking at the output from the top command to see if there is a specific program consuming excessive resources.

Hi,

You're right. Here's some output:

If I try to open emacs for example, I will get:


*[root@localhost ipw2200-0.10]

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

emacs: Cannot connect to X server :0.0.
Check the DISPLAY environment variable or use `-d'.
Also use the `xhost' program to verify that it is set to permit
connections from your machine. *

then I type '-d' (I'm not sure what '-d' should do) and get

*bash: -d: command not found*

and if I type xhost I get

*[root@localhost ipw2200-0.10]# xhost
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

xhost: unable to open display ":0.0"
*

If I do the above logged in as a user (i.e. not as root), I get the same output.

Thanks,
Jheffy

Back again.
With 'top', there's only about a total of 5% of memory being used, and it's the same before and after I load the driver. And I seem to be able to open applications after loading the drivers.
It's when I type 'ifup eth1' and it searches for an IP, finds one and connects to it, that I can no longer open applications.

Jheffy

OK, this actually has nothing to do with wireless, at least so far. From your error messages, I'm assuming that you are logging in as a normal user and using su to become root. This is good. The connection refused errors are happening because root does not have permission to use the normal user's X session. So, open a terminal window as a normal user, then enter xhost localhost. That will allow anyone who is connected at your computer, including root, to run X applications from that console. If you then su to root and enter emacs, it should run.

OK, I believe ifup is actually a script so we may be able to experiment and see where the problem is happening. There are two things to try here. First would be to request an IP address manually from a dhcp server. You'd do this with the following commands (as root):
dhclient eth1
ifconfig eth1 up

The other thing to try would be to assign an IP address manually with ifconfig:
ifconfig eth1 1.2.3.4
route add default gw 5.6.7.8

In the ifconfig command, replace 1.2.3.4 with whatever IP address you want to use for your computer. In the route command replace 5.6.7.8 with the IP address of your router.

Hi hangdog,

Every time I logged into FC2 and got those errors, I logged in as root. Never as a user.
I again tried 'xhost localhost', and I get the same XLib error message as when I try to open an application.
I also noticed that this sometimes begins happening right after I load the driver, and sometimes only after I do 'ifup eth1'
I tried 'dhclient eth1' followed by 'ifconfig eth1 up' and it connects as before, but I still cannot open applications.
I suppose I could try not loading the driver, and just using FC2 for a while to see if after a certain time it won't let me open applications anymore. I've actually done this for 10 minutes or so, and had not problems. So it really seems that it's the loading of the driver that disallows me to open any new applications.

So it's very strange. If you have any other ideas, they'd be most welcome!

Jheffy

OK, let me see if I have this straight - Please correct me if I've misunderstood:

- You log in as root, you have X running but you haven't loaded the ipw2200 module. In this state you can start programs without a problem.

- You load the ipw2200 module, and now you can't start any programs and if you try you get the Xlib connection refused error

If this is the case, man am I confused. The Xlib errors you are seeing are always a case of a user not "owning" the terminal the command was launched from (at least in my experience). In other words, it is an issue of X security and there is no way a kernel module for wireless should affect this.

At this point the only thing I can suggest is to rummage around in your /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages file and see if there are any entries that appear to be related to teh ipw2200 module or your inablitly to start programs.