First post, but I'll try to stick to guidelines or whatever

My Realtek 8180 WLAN Card (Genius 7100P) works fine in windows and perfectly from the place I'm working now. (hurray for windows, now flame me! . I got ndiswrapper 0.11 to install correctly and this is the dmesg log when I modprobe it (Ibtw I had to replace the 0.4 version with the new ndiswrapper.ko to get modprobe to work...)

ndiswrapper: no version for "struct_module" found: kernel tainted.
ndiswrapper version 0.11 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
ndiswrapper: using irq 17
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:40:f4:5e:12:c8 using driver netr8180
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP
ndiswrapper: driver netr8180 (KYE,01/28/2003,5.119.0127.2003) added

that kernel tainted stuff sounds pretty rough, but I reckon has nothing to do with me :-).
Then I do

"iwconfig wlan0 key restricted blablabla"

and shazam I get this iwconfig output

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"LaSEEB"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:06:25:9B:25:EA
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power:20 dBm Sensitivity=0/3
RTS thr:2432 B Fragment thr:2432 B
Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX Security mode:restricted
Power Managementff
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-53 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

which looks pretty good (except for the 100/100 link quality which is bullshit or probably just ndiswrapper bug). Now should be the time to ask for an IP using DHCP. This is what I get

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:40:f4:5e:12:c8
Sending on LPF/wlan0/00:40:f4:5e:12:c8
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 17
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

I get similar results with dhcpcd or the ifup script's dhcp client. Nothing appears. Normal eth0 works fine with dhclient.

"iwlist wlan0 scanning" outputs this
lan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:0F:F7:B6:86:F0
ESSID:"WiFi_IST"
Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.412GHz
Quality:0/100 Signal level:-72 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Encryption keyff
[snip]
Bit Rate:52Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Cell 02 - Address: 00:06:25:9B:25:EA
ESSID:"LaSEEB"
Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.437GHz
Quality:0/100 Signal level:-45 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Encryption keyn
Bit Rate:1Mb/s
[snip]
Bit Rate:1.5Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100

What gives? What can I try? Communication is obviously working as "iwlist wlan0 scanning" gives me the list of wireless networks over here. This looks to be a network problem, but appears in all networks. All of them work in windows.

Thank you very, very much!

Dont stress over the kernel tainted message. It just means you're force loading something that it doesnt like because you alter it in someway.

As for your problem there, I'd say its a DHCP IP leasing issue. Just out of interest, try giving your computer a name (nickname) and see if that helps. I cant find a fix for this issue on the internet but that may help identify it to the network and assign it an IP through DHCP. Just an idea.
Regards
Chris

Or try to set the IP manually. I think if you run dhcpcd over manual configuration it'll remember it and see if it can still take the same IP as I always get a message that it has configured my internet with the old IP address.

Nope.

Scarafazza-dazzum-fazzum

Set a nickname, didn't work.

Set the IP to what windows normally gives me. Then set Subnet Mask and added the default gateway. Don't know how to add DNS servers but that shouldn't be an issue. Link level protocol seems to have been installed, as I transmit and receive packets in this layer sucessfully. Did not work.

Is there a way to view the contents of the received layer 2 packets? Or print some more information regarding these packets. Maybe they are retransmit requests or "linux acess denied packets" or whatever...

btw I probably don't get any sensible link quality results cause I don't have an IP yet, right?

Thanks a lot for the quick replies and be sure to lose lots of sleep over this here problemo, ok?

this is the ifconfig output when I manually set IP's

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:03:0D:08:AA:FA
inet6 addr: fe80::203:dff:fe08:aafa/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2591 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2370 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:738920 (721.6 Kb) TX bytes:292422 (285.5 Kb)
Interrupt:17 Base address:0xe000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:396 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:396 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:39207 (38.2 Kb) TX bytes:39207 (38.2 Kb)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:F4:5E:12:C8
inet addr:192.168.1.72 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::240:f4ff:fe5e:12c8/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:442 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:186 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:96035 (93.7 Kb) TX bytes:13315 (13.0 Kb)
Interrupt:17 Memory:20800000-20800024

I've been reading around on this one and it looks like you're going to have to try linuxant's driverloader.

www.linuxant.com/driverloader

That'll teach you to buy cheap and nasty WLAN cards! Lots of people have been having this prob with the 8180 chipset and there is no workaround listed despite much searching of forums and googling. Sorry dude, looks like there's gonna need to be some money on the table if you want this to go any further.

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh. No money for linuxant! I can still be a happy cheapskate.
[Insert further orgasmic displays of cybernetic enjoyment]

I got it working.

Turns out I just needed a better RTL8180.sys WindowsXP driver, version 170 worked fine.
I downloaded from

ftp://202.65.194.18/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/ndis5x-8180(170).zip

but it's also available from the ndiswrapper site, I think. Every other step was correct.
For those who have the same problem in mandrake 10.0 this is my configuration

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
WIRELESS_MODE=Managed
WIRELESS_ENC_KEY="restricted XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
WIRELESS_ESSID=LaSEEB

or whatever your network parameters are. Then I just do

modprobe ndiswrapper
ifup wlan0

had to modify check_network_down() function in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/network-functions (just added a bigger usleep).

now I wanted to find a script that uses the "iflist scanning wlan0" to allow you to choose which network you want to bring up. but that'lll probably have to wait...

hehe, forgot something important.

A BIG THANK YOU!

_____
joao