Ok I have an option of three wireless cards and several Distros of Linux to choose from, but I am still having no success.

Wireless cards I have are.

PCMCIA - Belkin F5D6020 - 802.11b
PCMCIA - TRENDnet TEW-421PC - 802.11g
USB - DLINK DWL-G122 - 802.11g

Suse 9 & 10 Recognise the Belkin, but as a PCMCIA Eth Card, not Wireless

Suse 10 - Recognises the DLINK, allows full configuration, but then only allows you to view one web page, then acts if there is no AP.

Ubuntu, Doesnt Recognise anything at all

Mandrake 10 - Doesnt recognise anything.

Ive now just tried Fedora Core 5. And again it doesnt recognise anything.

Can anyone give me some pointers where to go. I am a complete numpty when it comes to Linux.

I will give up soon and go back to XP.

Mike.

Hi, I was very disppointed about the bad support of wifi unter linux as well.

I played around awhile and found 2 possibilities:
1) ndiswrapper:
Cool thing that lets you use your windows drivers for wlan devices under Linux.
But it does not support Monitor Mode !!
More info: ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation

2) Madwifi:
Claims to support lot of cards, which it does, but wizj my Chipset (Atheros) it supported only managed mode, not even ad-hoc !!
More info:
//madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo


Hope this helps !

WiFi in Linux definitely needs improvement! I'm using a Trendnet card similar to the one mentioned, except it's PCI. I have it working in FC4 via ndiswrapper, and even managed to get wpa working after quite a bit of trial and error.

I found the information on some of the online forums helpful. In additon to this one, fedorasolved.com has a nice how-to for ndiswrapper, and there's some good info at fedoraforum.org, regarding wpa supplicant.

It's nowhere near plug and play, but it is possible if you're willing to invest the time and effort.

I also lost another 500 hairs over this (of my remaining 500,000, give or take a few 1000):

After installing Fedora 5, updating to the most recent kernel, and mocking around several times with the idea of building ndiswrapper (following carefully all the howtos I could find),
I finally came across a download of an rpm that might do the job (I thought)
I simply used google and entered the words

Fedora ndiswrapper FC5 kernel 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5

(which happens to be the one I have now (use uname -r to find out),

This brought me a choice of rpms on some obscure webpages that I forgot,
among them:

ndiswrapper-kmdl-2.6.16-1.2096_FC5-1.11-3.rhfc5.at.i686.rpm

I downloaded the wrong one first. It installed but I realized it
was a version for a 64 bit architecture which I don't have. So I tried
to replace it by another choice. but everyone, of the little helpers, like
yum and rpm said, basically, "it's already installed you fool".
Trying it the soft way, with yum uninstall, didn't work, nor did rpm -e
have any result.

So I finally forced overwriting the installation using rpm --force -i .

Was probably also a bad idea, but I figure it did something. However,
the question is now:

WHERE IS IT, AND WHAT IS IT, AND WHAT DID IT DO?


So I guess I have installed ndiswrapper and it may even be the right one,
still I don't have a clue how to continue: First, I don't know where
the module is, and second, if I find it, how do I load it into the kernel?

Hi,

I used this description, worked fine !!

Loading ndiswarepper (after make&make install):

modprobe ndiswrapper
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...p/Installation

thanks mkirc, it's good that it works for you, since this kept me trying:

In the meantime, I learned a little bit more after barking up all the wrong
trees in the park but finally got to install ndiswrapper and actually load the
modules in the kernel (or whatever I'm doing there). What really helped
was reading carefully the instructions in the file INSTALL in the
distribution of ndiswrapper.

Now, there were still a lot of traps on the way. For example, for quite some
time I had loaded the wrong version of ndiswrapper. If you make an
update, using yum or something, there may be an ndiswrapper.ko in
/lib/modules/...kernel.../updates

However, the installation of ndiswrapper by make install copies
the file ndiswrapper.ko to /lib/modules/...kernel.../misc.

To make sure what was loaded, there is also:

/sbin/modinfo ndiswrapper

At any rate, I got a lot further this time and hope that it will work soon.
(well it's still not working right, but I've got to bark up a number of more
trees).

Thanks all

These are all talking about makes and re-compiling. As I said im a numpty. Im not a programmer. This is all well over my head.

OK, a bit of an update. And some success, for those who are interested, and no need for ndiswrapper.

I have binned FC5 and gone back to Suse 10 with the latest updates.

The Belkin now talks to my router with wep enabled, so a secureish wireless network.

I can access and view all the settings in my router ok.

The problem seems to be related to the routers DHCP/DNS Server, as I have to set the following.

The Linux Laptop is set to static IP, with the correct class of subnet mask.
Ive had to manually populate the Default Gateway and DNS Information.

I have also set up a routing table for all addresses, to go via the router ie in this case 0.0.0.0 (All addresses) goes to 10.0.0.136 which is the router ip.

Its been working for an hour now, and surfing the web quite happily.

Mikey,
The DWL-G122 Definately works in Linux (very well in fact).. There 'may' be two different versions of this stick. Check the back of the stick and look for H/W Ver.:: B1 >>> also F/W ver 2.x
If it has very same as my example the USB Dongle has a Ralink rt2570 chip (which is the bit that defines which driver to use)
goto: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com and download the CVS for rt2570
Install as per instructions in Readme and you should be fine and in any distro, I know it definately works in ubuntu..
This driver is actually very good and offers some quite fun things that other cards cannot do =)
Good Luck!

Yes, there are several versions of the DWL-G122. I managed to get it
to work for Fedora 5 with the version DWL-G122 vers. A2. However,
I had to hand edit the files generated by ndiswrapper in /etc/ndiswrapper to make it work. Details are in my last post in this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=433752

this may not apply to other versions of diswrapper: The following was
what I had at install time: FC5 kernel 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5 wireless with ndiswrapper-1.15. D-Link DWL-G122 vers A2.

R.