i am not that new to linux, but still run into problems now and then.....i used ndiswrapper to install the driver for my wireless card, which went through smoothly...the problem now is that when i do iwconfig wlan0, under ESSID it says off/any and i cant change it. i ahve tried many ways including "iwconfig wlan0 essid WIRELESS" and also editing my /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf file ...........any suggestions?

If you have encryption you will need to set the key first. You might also want to run
iwlist wlan0 scan
and see if it can see your AP.
Cheers
Chris

yea i tried setting the encryption first and it didnt work....also iwspy wlan0 scan shows nothing.....

not iwspy notice, iwlist.

I am having the same problem. I got everything installed with no problems. My little "E" light is on meaning the wireless card is "alive". But when I enter iwlist wlan0 scan, the result is "No Scan Results".
The Fn + F2 buttons activate and de-activate the wireless card as they are supposed to.
I configured my essid, but when I enter: iwconfig wlan0, it lists the ESSID is "off/any".

I am using a eMachine M6805, the card is broadcom 54g Max Performance.

Helppp

Thanks in advance guys

But I have the same problem, or at least a similar one. I cannot get the darn essid to change from "off/any" unless I put it into ad-hoc mode. Then when I change it back to managed, the essid reverts back to "off/any". I have tried using wpa supplicant regardless, and it doesnt work (since I have a WPA secured network). I am quite at wits end...is there any other way to change the essid other than using iwconfig??

Try bringing the interface up first:

ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid <my_ssid>

Finally a post with the same problem I'm having. On top of that the previous suggestion also does not work (ifconfig wlan0 up --> no results for iwconfig...)

I've had this problem both with Slackware 12 and Fluxbuntu 7.10RC. Wired connections work no problem. iwconfig fails to change any settings.. just as stated above tried manipulation of both rc.wireless.conf and rc.inet1.conf (Slackware).

Using the DLink WUA 2340 wireless usb key personally, ndiswrapper functioning properly, no dice on network configuration .

Wow.. this is a very old thread 0_o

Edit: Playing around more with this stuff I found something even more interesting occuring. Running iwconfig gave essid as "off/any", however upon running iwconfig 10 times over the course of a few seconds, it actually yielded a couple of times essid as "Home" as required.

Is this a symptom of two different pieces of software competeing for control? It seems like perhaps there's another program with a different config file that's over ruling this.

I installed the driver with NDisWrapper and I can't seem to connect. I entered in all my wireless router info in network settings. Below is what I got when I ran inwcofig.

matt@2WIRE396:~$ sudo iwconfig
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:20 dBm Sensitivity=0/3
RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Any ideas on what the problem is and what I should do. I wonder what the Host name should be set to.

Why don't you start a new thread. Since this one is so old, it might not really get noticed.

Bumping this thread because this just happened to me:

This happens when you have the network-manager daemon running. Debian and Ubuntu have it enabled by default because the KDE and GNOME desktop environments use it to manage your network settings and to connect to wireless networks from the GUI; as a result, it interferes with what you do from the command line, and if you want to control your wireless interface with good ol' iwconfig and ifconfig, you have to disable it.

To do so, write this:

I did this and it worked right away, dhclient fetched properly the IP address from my wireless modem immediately afterwards.

Hope you find it useful. :3