Today I installed Ubuntu 8.10 onto a PC which uses a USB DONGLE to connect to the wireless internet.

The make of this is MSI

The wireless network is recognised and has signal when I click on the networking icon on the top task bar but when I try connecting, the icon animates for a while then says the network has been disconnected (this is not true because I am using another laptop online at the same time).

The results of iwconfig are below:

matt@desktop:~$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"RG54G2" Nickname:"zd1201"
Mode:Managed Frequency:15.198 kHz Access Point: Invalid
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s
Retry RTS thrff Fragment thrff
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 suggestions?

The "Access Point: invalid" is strange; I've never seen it before.

What is your setup like - managed (AP) or peer-to-peer? Do you have wireless security, and which version? (WPA-PSK, etc).

pinniped, in the most joking of senses I am calling you out (so don't take it seriously) in reference to http://help.lockergnome.com/linux/Br...ict408550.html

Look for "Access Point: Invalid" and then "pinniped"

I just happened to come across this looking for the error.

WEP which probably isn't the best but thats what is on at the moment and it's AP

Weird, I just plugged a different dongle in and it connected straight away!

Same brand/model of dongle?

See ... and people still don't believe i'm senile. I must have been working late too when I posted that over a year ago; I was poo-pooing WPA-PSK rather than WEP2. :}

No, this one is a Targus one...

iwconfig...

wlan1 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"RG54G2"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442 GHz Access Point: 00:11:09:23:0C:85
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thr=2352 B
Power Managementff
Link Quality=88/100 Signal level:31/100
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0