Using Mandriva latest. Compaq Presario cq60

Mandriva detects home network on installation and all is lovely.
When network went down for a while the network could not be found.
Have rebooted many times, tried everything etc etc.
Now reinstalled Mandriva and all is fine again am online again.

Mighty peeved that Linux is so flakey! Any ideas on

How to turn it on again without having to reinstall Mandrake.

btw Ubuntu OpenSuse Fedora Solaris even all fail to detect my wireless network! Mandriva does, but..

There is no reason to re-install to get back online with Mandriva, or any other distro that is properly installed.

Mandy has many tools to determine status, as does wireless tools. What is lacking is your skill, I'm not saying that to be nasty, it just that it is a learned skill. Re-install is a windoze type approach.

From the command line try these commands when things are working. Then you will start to learn what is there when things work, and when things fail, you can start to have some idea what isn't working.

I post the commands in single quotes, like this, 'command'. Type only what is between the quotes.

'/sbin/ifconfig' will will list information about the status of your configured interfaces. It will output the names of each interface. If you have a single card, you will see at least two listings. example

This is from a wired ethernet card, it will look similar from a wireless card.

'/sbin/iwconfig' this command will list the status of the wireless interface. I'm not on my lappy right now. Try it, you should see things like "ESSID" which comes from the wireless access point you are connected to.

You can activate and deactivate the interface, once you know the name. 'ifup eth0' and 'ifdown eth0' would activate and deactivate the interface eth0.

Open up MCC ( Mandriva Control Center ). There is a section called Networking and Internet. Go there, you will see the Network Center. Open it, you can display the wireless interface(s) there, monitor and re-configure if necessary. You can see if data is being sent and received.

When you need more information, you can install a package called Nmap. It allows you to trace data being sent and received. This is an advanced tool, any for most users in never needed.

Try these things out, post your questions, and don't ever re-install to fix a problem like this.

Hope this helps.

How right you are indeed, I have tried all you suggested and am delving further.
This is a quick reply to thank you for putting me on the path.
Reminds me of the fun days of dos a long time ago incidentally and cpm before that even..

Cheers, Davin

Glad I could help. Do not hesitate to ask, if you need more guidance. ( long time mandy user... )

Since my beginners luck just ran out I lost the wifi connection again. Tried Mandriva Network Center /Wireless and Apple Network showed up.
Clicked on Connect and noting happened or happens.... still waiting.


Now following previous kind assistance I tried ifup wlan0 and got "command not found"

So query is - which directory should I be in for this command to work?
From [me@localhost /]$ prompt I tried find ifdown and got " no such file or directory"

So I tried man ifdown and lots of stuff.

So if the man page for ifdown exists but the command ifdown doesn't ( using find ) then whats up doc ?


There is a barrage of helpful stuff available but I can't find a simple oversight of directory structures and where is what etc.

( Found something called Wireless connection which appeared after a right click on the Network icon, same thing but eventually the connection was made,
there has to be a first time for everything )

This command usually needs root privileges, so on the command prompt, 'su' and enter, you will be prompted for the root password, enter it, and run the command. To answer the question, where is this command... and a lot of others...

oh dear, forgot to be root!

Thanks for your help Cliff.

Current bother is trying to activate IDLE for python in Mandriva.
I have it running fine in Win XP and in Mac OSX but can't find it in Mandriva.

Any ideas maybe?

Sorry, can't help with that. Not much experience with python.