Hey everyone...I just installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my new Dell 1501, and I am up and running just fine.

For my wireless card, I used the guide at ubuntu1501.blogspot
to get ndiswrapper and the windows driver to use the installed card. I ran through all the steps as described, and the WiFi light came on as it should as I rebooted towards the end. But, when I used "sudo iwlist scanning", I got the message "lo interface does not support scanning, eth0 interface does not support scanning."

With the above message and the fact that the WiFi light is on, does anyone have any ideas where I might have gone wrong, or where the error is? Thanks!!

The ndiswrapper will be wlan0 if it is see. lo is your loopback interface which is 127.0.0.1 and eth0 is more than likely your wired nic. I assume you loaded the windows inf driver and then load the ndiswrapper module as in the install and setup docs on ndiswrapper site.

Brian

Thanks for your reply Brian1..
I did install the windows driver and ndiswrapper as instructed to do. With the WiFi light on, I would assume that the driver installed correctly and is functioning, as the light (should) indicate that the OS sees the hardware and that it is running. This is why I was confused when I got the message that scanning was not supported.

To clarify, because I can't tell from your post if you got it or not:

"iwlist wlan0 scan" should return the desired results.

"iwlist scan" will run through all of the available interfaces - in your case, eth0, lo and wlan0. Since the first two have no wireless extensions, the error message is returned.

I tried "iwlist wlan0 scan", and I still get the interface does not support scanning message. I also replaced the 0 with an O (still a newby), getting the same result. Ideas??

Sometimes the "light" on the card simply indicates that it's receiving power, not that it's otherwise working.

Which "wireless card" are you using? Perhaps it doesn't support scanning, although the message is often generated when the card has not been activated.

Note, also, that Ubuntu may have automatically installed a FOSS driver for your card. If that has been done, neither the FOSS drive nor the ndiswrapper driver will work correctly, since each one would assume that it had exclusive access to the card.

You could try opening a terminal (command line) window and issuing the command dmesg to see the messages generated by the system during boot. The ones concerning the wireless driver(s) should be somewhere towards the end of the output. (You may need to scroll the window.)