I'm using Fedora core 3 on an ibm x40 and it seems to recognize my wireless card in Kudzu as it named it and asked me to configure. I chose DHCP. However, when I look at it in my KWIFI manager thing it says the card is not connected or present with a big old question mark. Then, when I checked my network manager it calls the intel pro 2100 wireless device eth1 and when I attempt to activate the connection it says the card is not present. I thought perhaps if I changed the status from ethernet to wireless it would work but somehow I cannot do that. And, if I try to add another wireless device the intel pro 2100 ipw2100 is not listed.

What should I do? I'm happy that it recognizes the card but I obviously need some help configuring it. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Be aware that I'm brand new (3 days) to linux and need really specific child-like explanations.

Welcome to LQ!

Actually the name of the card doesn't matter. You can call it eth1, wlan0 or even wirelessnetworkcardthatdoesntwork if you really want to. So lets look elsewhere for your trouble.

I'm gonna suggest that for the time being you forget about KWifiManager. In my experience it is not really a reliable tool for configuring a card or acurately reporting the state of the card. So what I would do is boot up the computer, pop open a console and look at the outputs of iwconfig and ifconfig. You should be able to see your wireless card listed in both of those and the iwconfig output should suggest that it has wireless capabilities.

If those outputs look OK, then we can try configuring with the iwconfig command and see what happens. Usually you need to set the SSID, mode and WEP key (if you use one) like this:

iwconfig eth1 key XXXXXXXXXXXXX (of course this assumes eth1 is the wireless card and XXXXXX is the hex WEP key if you use one)
iwconfig eth1 mode managed (or also try auto)
iwconfig eth1 essid YYYYYYY (where YYYYY is the SSID of your access point)


Post back with any questions or errors you see

I'm not at my computer right now but will check on this. I seem to recall during bootup that it was saying eth1 failed however it shows it in the network manager after it is booted. Good to know that KWIFI manager is not the most reliable. Now that I think about it when I tried Linux MEPIS release sometime ago KWIFI said it didn't recognize the wireless card and yet seemed to scan and find wireless connections. Also, thanks for being specific in your explanation.