I'm trying to set up a connection to my home wireless network in the latest version of Fedora. The device identifies it as "Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01)" and shows up within Fedora's network settings window.

When I try to add a wireless connection through the whole little wizard, I specify everything correctly, including the 128 bit WEP key. I save the changes.

The first time I tried, I immediately tried to activate the card. It gave an interesting error relating to "Unexpected EOF" (end of file). The second time, I deleted the device I just made and went through the wizard again, saved the changes, and rebooted. This time I was greeted with a hardware probe window during startup asking what to do with the newly removed hardware ("Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01)") and the newly discovered hardware--the exact same device, in that order. For spite I go through its wizard, selecting DHCP (the only relevant option).

Long story short, I just can't get a simple wireless connection up. What would be the troubleshooting steps? The only troubleshooting I've done is verify that "lspci" displays "Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01)".

This is a Fujitsu B2620 laptop. The built-in wireless (the device in question) works fine in Windows.

Best to try one of these drivers

http://hostap.epitest.fi/
http://www.linux-wlan.org/

Also try to use command line as much as possible.

edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface name>
to set networking and wireless settings for a card.

look at ifup-wireless file in the same directory for what wireless parameters can be set.

ifdown <interface>
ifup <interface>

to bring down and bring up an interface

/etc/init.d/network stop
/etc/init.d/network start

to stop and start network.

useful commands are iwconfig, ifconfig, nestat -rn, lsmod, modprobe

I think I found out the problem, which was pretty obscure: my WEP key has a ' in it, and keys-eth1's key is quoted in single quotes, too. I'm going to try escaping it to see if it works.

Escaping the ' didn't work, but enclosing the string with double quotes instead did. However, I'm still not online, so I'm redoing the whole process to make sure nothing else is wrong.

Side note: why don't I have pico installed? I'm lucky I chose to install xemacs during installation, but I thought pico was included in every distribution of Linux (and Unix, for that matter).

Well it fixed the Unexpected EOF, but trying to bring up eth0 always times out with the error "Cannot get driver information: Operation not supported"...and then naturally, trying to get an IP times out as well.

I've searched but can't find any specific answers (or the frustrating generic response of "I fixed it" with no description of how...). Any ideas? Those commands were very helpful.

edit: the AP MAC ID is showing up as 44:44:44... which is obviously not correct. I have trillion-checked the encryption key, both in hex and in ASCII, and entered it through the Redhat wizard and iwconfig, and it still refuses to start eth0 with the beforementioned error.

Cannot get driver information: Operation not supported"

First check that driver is loading ok, if so, then sounds like your linux is not configured for wireless correctly.

How would I check if the driver is loading correctly? All I know is that lspci correctly shows the card, and modprobe orinoco_pci doesn't produce any output (which I assume means no errors). Except for the network initialization step for eth0, all of the startup steps say [OK].

Are you using the hostap or the linux-wlan driver?

Whichever came with the Fedora distribution.

I tried to use the linux-wlan drivers, but have no way of getting the Linux kernel source onto the laptop.

look on your fedora installation CD's and see if you have a kernel-source RPM.

Thanks, I installed them (along with some other bits and pieces that I've been meaning to install, although pico is still nowhere to be found).

And amazingly I can now ping my access point. I'm about to try servers outside my network; domain names are not resolving yet.

Thanks so far

Thank god, simply checking the DNS from Provider checkbox made it resolve everything. Thanks very much for the help.

Great!

for info on pico:

http://sniptools.com/vault/fixing-na...s-on-linux.htm