dell inspiron 9300 laptop, ipw2200bg wireless card, mandake 10.1 recognized card but didn't install correctly, recently upgraded to mandriva 2006 le, installs card just great! When router is set for no encryption on wireless, card works great, when encryption turned on, can't see gateway so can't get out, have configured with open and secure wep and pka, still no joy, laptop dual boots to winxp and have set for wpa in that os and it works just fine, help????

A couple of things to think about:

Check your wpa_supplicant configuration file and make sure that you haven't mistyped a key

Have a look through your logs and see if the wireless driver or wpa_supplicant are complaining about anything (/var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages)

Check the output of iwconfig and see if it is properly configured

I tried and failed trying to get WPA-PSK up and running straight away... too many problems.

I got my card working with 64bit WEP (10 HEX character key), OPEN, first. Try that, then have a go for WPA.

I am close to getting WPA up and running, but I'm not there yet!

As I mentioned before, it doesn't matter how I set up the encryption, still doesn't work. WEP doesn't work properly (causes problems) on XP, but wpa works. I tried open wep on linux, but no luck. I typed /sbin/iwconfig and saw that my encryption key wasn't typed in as well as a lot of other settings. I did a man iwconfig to determine how to enter some of the settings. I then went into manage the network settings and when I re-entered the encryption key into the gui, it lost it in iwconfig. I also entered a channel and it intepreted it as a frequency. I also tried typing /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages and I got a message saying I didn't have permission, but I am doing this as root. It seems to not hold the settings. I still can't even ping myself, so it's not even getting so far as the network. To reiterate, it works in xp with wpa just fine, and if I have security for wireless on the router with no encryption it works just fine in linux, just not with encrypted wireless in linux (and this is a dual boot laptop). At least this version let me set up the wireless, version 10.1 wouldn't work at all. Of course encrypted wireless if the setting of choice. : )

This is a good reason not to use the GUI. I would stick with a console until you get this figured out. The GUI is just adding to your troubles.
That is what is supposed to happen. Channels are just a convenient way to express frequency. It is much easier to remember channel 11 than 2.472Ghz.
How are you becoming root? If you are using su, try su - (note the -). Root really should be able to access those logs.

If you are trying to sort out wpa, you probably should post your configuration file and the command you are using to call wpa_supplicant.

I used the gui to set up the network wireless in the first place, and then it was suggested in this forum to work with iwconfig (I don't know much about linux, still learning, much of this is foreign to me). As far as becoming root, the distro wouldn't let me set up the wireless without being root, even though I logged into the control panel as root. Therefore, I logged in as root. I ordinarily refrain from that, but this is an exception for the reasons I stated above. Thus, I was about as root as you can get. I shouldn't have to su when logged in as root, should I? Also, since I don't know much about this, can you please tell me exactly which config file to post (path, is it iwconfig? Also, I don't understand about calling he wpa-supplicant. I have heard of it, but don't know anything about it. Sorry for all the questions. Thanks. : )

I agree, you can't get any more root than logging in as root. And no, if you are root, you shouldn't need to use su. Which means you should be able to read your log files. If you run ls -l /var/log can you see who owns syslog and messages and with what permissions?

This may be the root of the problem. The normal wireless tools like iwconfig, only deal with WEP, not WPA encryption. Basically, you can't set a WPA key with iwconfig. Instead, you have to install a program called wpa_supplicant which actually handles the encryption end of things. If you are using a stock Mandriva kernel, I would look and see if there is an RPM that will work with the ipw2200 driver. Otherwise you are going to have to compile this from source.

This is my /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf:

# Wireless LAN adapter configuration

VERBOSE=1

case "$HWADDR" in

00:90:96:xx:xx:xx) # The MAC address of my WiFI NIC
INFO="Broadcom WLAN 802.11g on Laptop" # Initialisation message
ESSID="YOURSSID" # SSID goes here
CHANNEL="1" # Channel goes here
MODE="Managed"
KEY="YOURWEPKEY" # Your 10 character 64bit HEX WEP key goes here
;;
esac

On my Linksys WRT54G router, when I go to enter a WEP key when configuring WEP, it converts it to 4 64bit 10 character HEX keys. I enter the first of the four keys into in the line above.

Alternatively, you can do from the command prompt:

iwconfig wlan0 essid YOURSSID
iwconfig wlan0 key YOURWEPKEY open
iwconfig wlan0 channel YOURCHANNEL
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed

Then, I do:

dhcpcd wlan0 -s 192.168.1.101

to get dhcp running (but statically assigning that IP) - DHCPCD does other things than just assign an IP.

To get WPA working, I think that you need tol get this working first, then configure WPA_Supplicant, and then switch the router over to WPA. You'll need a wired connection to manage the router during this...

Well, I actually did get WEP to work except it wouldn't hold the restricted settings on the wireless connection portion of the control panel. It would say it was restricted in the network configuration portion of the control panel, but whenever I changed it in the wireless connection portion and told it to connect, it jumped back to open wep. ALSO - the wireless connection kept disconnecting. The only way I could get it to start working again was to reconfigure the wireless connection. Strange indeed. I once again tried to set up WEP in the windows interface, but like linux not working with wpa, windows didn't work with wep. I will try to learn more about the wpa supplicant and see if that might work, but I am just about ready to give up.

Don't use that KDE applet...