Wireless Connectivity in Fedora Core 8 on Dell Inspiron 8600
 

Greetings all!

I'm new to Linux and have been struggling with adapting my installation of Fedora Core 8 to work on my Inspiron 8600 laptop. The built-in wireless is an Intel PRO 2200BG Network Connection. Reading over this thread I removed NetworkManager, which had at one point picked up WiFi connections, and installed ndiswrapper and wpa-supplicant instead. Here's how things stand now:

From modprobe.conf in /etc:
My wireless network is being detected:
Currently, iwconfig reads as follows:
And ifcfg-eth1 in etc/sysconfig/network-scripts:
Running "dmesg | grep" for either "eth1" or "ndiswrapper" yields nothing. Perhaps they are not loading on startup? Or maybe I'm doing something else wrong? Please let me know anything I could do to resolve this issue.

Thanks so much in advance!

Since its is being identified as eth1 and when you posted the ndiswrapper -l output it is using the kernel ipw2200 module. This is the module you whould use and not ndiswrapper. the ipw2200 is really designed for that chipset.

Also the cell infinity_circuit is posted as wpa mode encryption. have you defined the passkey in your wpa_supplicant.conf since not using NetworManager or NM_CONTROLLED no

Brian

Brian1, thanks for responding so promptly.

I've uninstalled ndiswrapper and changed modprobe.conf to point eth1 at the ipw2200 module. Now, the following message appears on startup:

Also, wpa_supplicant.conf specifies the passkey for infinity_circuit.

First thing to do from here is turn off wpa on the router and try to connect to the router as plain connection no security. One thing I recommend is not use odd characters in networking names. Yes they may work fine but using just letters and numbers seems to eliminate the posiblilties of different OSes not understanding them. Just my experience working with multiple OSes. I know you are not using them but something i go by. Also you might post your unencryted passphrase it may contain something wpa in Linux cannot use. I have seen someone use a " in theirs which is fine in Windows but does not generate correctly in linux.

Brian

For a lot of characters, particularly those that have a meaning in a linux shell (and " would be one of those), you need to escape them in your config files and if you do that, they work fine. You also may need to encapsulate the entire passphrase in single or double quotes (which can get kinda funky looking if " is part of the passphrase). I recently ran across a network that used ? in the passphrase, and escaping each of the ? characters worked. So in Windows, you can get away with entering:

passphrase?

Whereas in Linux you might need:

"passphrase\?" or 'passphrase\?'

If the special character is in the middle of the passkey, do you still just need a single \, or would it look like this:

"pass\?\phrase"

I'm pretty sure that you just need the single \ so

"pass\?phrase" would probably work. From my limited experience, this sort of stuff seems to follow the normal rules for escaping characters in bash.

Thanks, Hangdog. Unfortunately, both with escaped special characters and with security disabled, eth1 still refuses to activate.

Have you tried no security yet? No sense fighting WPA if it is the network module or other config issue to begin with. One layer at a time.

Brian

As I said, I tried restarting the laptop with security disabled. I got the same error message both on startup and activating the interface after logging in as root.

OK with no WPA enabled on the laptop and the router then also change CHANNEL=1 to just CHANNEL= in the ifcfg-eth1 file.
As root issue the command ' /sbin/service network restart '

Brian

Still getting the same error, with security disabled and ipw2200 installed clean without ndiswrapper.

Added tags to post, please help!

I'd like to go back to Brian1's suggestion that you turn off wpa encyrption and see if you can connect that way. We need to figure out if you're having a driver problem or a wpa problem, and turning off wpa for a bit is the only way to sort that out. So try to connect without wpa and post the iwconfig and ifconfig outputs if you have trouble.

All security is disabled and SSID is broadcasting. Makes me a bit nervous, but nevermind that. My wireless connection is still called eth1.

ifconfig:
iwconfig:
When activating eth1 via the network configuration interface:

OK, it is pretty clear that ipw2200 isn't loaded, and that is a problem. Have a look at the output of lsmod and see if ipw2200 is listed. If it isn't, then (as root) run modprobe ipw2200 and see if your wireless card shows up in iwconfig. A successful run of modprobe doesn't' give any feedback, it just goes back to the prompt. If modprobe does complain it means there was an error and you should post that message.

Looks like you're on the right track. Here's the modprobe dump:

And dmesg:

So do I need a fresh iteration of the ipw2200 driver? Does the boot order need to be adjusted? Or are my newbieish Linux eyes missing something obvious?

If you're lucky, running depmod -a as root may solve the problem with the unknown parameter error. If not, you're going to need to do a fresh re-install of ipw2200.

depmod did exactly zero so I uninstalled ipw2200 and went to redownload the rpm. When I went to install the package however, I ran into this:

Not sure where to find that dependency...

D'OH... Sorry, you shouldn't have to re-install the RPM at all. You're running a 2.6.24 kernel, and that should have ipw2200 built in. All you should need to do is install firmware and it should work.

Which, of course, brings up the issue with why it isn't. If I were in your shoes, I would uninstall any RPM you installed for ipw2200 and then try to re-install your kernel RPM. I'm guessing that in all the horsing around, something has gotten overwritten by older software and that is what is going on.

I feel like quite the newb. I've searched for the kernel RPM and tried updating it both from search results and yum. It says the package is already installed and I can't find ipw2200.ko by itself outside of what's already in the directory. What am I doing wrong??

OK, I did some googling, and it looks like FC8 had a hiccup with regards to ipw2200. Unfortunately, the errors being reports (for example see the bottom of this page) aren't the same as yours. I've also seen some reports that even an ndiswrapper install can cause trouble for FC8. So, I think you've got a few options:

1) Try the fix in the page I linked to in this post. Hey, it can't get any worse, can it? I'm a little hesitant to give you advice on how to re-load the kernel package since I don't use Fedora, but I think using some of the rpm flags might work. So rpm --replacepkgs pkgname.rpm should just replace the package even if it is already installed. By the way, you'll want good backups of anything important!

2) Do a re-install of FC8. I don't normally like to suggest this, but I'm not finding your error anywhere out there and I'm wondering if something hasn't gotten corrupted along the way. A re-install would give you a clean system to work from.

3)Switch distros. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a strong personal bias against Fedora. It is a gigantic beta test, and it is continually breaking things. It should come with a big, fat warning that only experienced linux users should touch it, and then only if they have a severe masochistic streak. To be honest, I have no idea why anyone uses it, and if anyone besides Red Hat produced it, it probably would have died by now. Unless you have a strong reason for using Fedora, another distro might suit your needs better.

Considering that I am completely new to Linux, I'm more than willing to switch distros. I was introduced to Fedora by a former co-worker. I found most of the applications I added to be easy to install so I feel confident in re-installing them to another distro. What would you suggest? I need something with Apache, php and support for MySQL.

Those three are found in pretty much any of the major distros, so you really can't go wrong there.
Since this is likely a major point for you, both Ubuntu (or any of the *buntus) or openSuse have good, automated software installation tools. If you're up for a bit more of a challenge, Debian's apt-get is kind of the granddaddy of the automated software installation tools.

To be honest, I've installed Ubuntu for a couple of friends who had never used Linux, and they found it pretty straight forward to handle. There is also a pretty significant community around Ubuntu, both here and on their own forums, so help is usually plentiful. Ubuntu does have its oddities (its use of sudo can only be classified as abusive and the "lets have a separate distro for each X environment" attitude is just weird) but it is aimed squarely at new Linux users and it does have support for Apache, PHP and MySQL.

Hangdog, thank you so much for your help and advice. I'm downloading the iso of Ubuntu now, and if I run into any problems, I'll start a new thread. I actually look forward to reinstalling things like Bluefish, MySQL, VMWare and WINE on Ubuntu... that's how much of a nerd I really am. 8-B Thanks again!