I'm new as of today, but I've been lurking for 2 weeks trying to get the wpc54g working on my laptop.

I have fedora core 3 running on a sony pcg-r505el. I also have linksys wpc54g working using ndiswrapper. This morning, I got wpa_supplicant working and was able to associate with my access point using WPA-PSK TKIP.

I was able to ping the router, and google.com, so I know that a connection is made. My problem is that once I run wpa_supplicant, I am not able to open any other programs, and it sounds like the cpu is going at 100% (because of the fan, but I can't verify cause I don't know how in linux).

Any suggestions? I have looking for an answer all morning before I posted.

I know this doesn't really help your problems but fyi

You can check cpu status with the command

top

(Sounds strange...its the actual name)

thanks.

Ok, I have been messing around some more (keep in mind my very limited linux knowledge).
I have found that I can start the wlan0 interface with no problems ("ifconfig wlan0 up"), and I can also start wpa_supplicant and associate to my access point with no problems (using "wpa_supplicant -D ndiswrapper -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Bw" or -dd instead of -Bw).

But, as soon as I do "dhclient wlan0" then the problems start. After that I am no longer able to open programs like firefox. I can ping servers, but nothing will open.

Any ideas?

some more testing:

The laptop functions perfectly on my home wireless network, but at work as soon as it pulls an IP address from the dhcp server then it crashes (Well, I call it crashing. The mouse still works but no programs will open).

Any help appreciated.

I would normally suggest a look at your /ect/hosts file because a bad entry there can send apps that use the network in some way spinning, but your comment about fan makes it sound as though you have a runaway process.

When the "lock-up" occurs, try to open a console with CTRL-ALT-F2, log in and run "top" to see what's hogging the resources. If you can't get to a console, try to ssh in and run top.

It's probably worth checking the hosts file as well. Nothing to lose.

Ok, I'm stumped.

Running "top" shows that the cpu usage while idle is about 1.3%, definitely not being all hogged by one application. But I am still not able to open any programs once I have done "dhclient wlan0."

I checked the hosts file and the only entry is 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain.

When I try to open a file from the terminal (for example: gedit /etc/hosts) I get "Gtk-Warning **: cannot open display:"

Also, when I tried "emacs /etc/hosts" I got "emacs: Cannot connect to X server :0.0.

IwritePatents:

I just went to www.google.com/linux and did a search for wpa_supplicant just to find out what it was (still learning myself) and I came across something that might help (or at least I hope it helps). It was posted on the 22nd of February 2005. Found it here It says it's a security patch for Gentoo to patch a buffer overflow problem that could lead to a Denial of Service.

Just a thought.

efanning

thanks for the help, I finally isolated the problem.

I don't know what exactly was causing the problem, but I noticed something strange.
I had done a ctrl-alt-F1, when I returned to the desktop and opened a terminal, instead of saying danny@localhost, it showed danny@brian2. Brian2 was the name of a laptop that used to use the wireless adapter that is now in my laptop. All I can guess (cause I'm no expert) is that the router was assigning the same IP address that Brian2 used to get (because of the same mac address) and that was somehow messing up the laptop.

I am concerned that laptop renamed itself to Brian2 without any interaction from me. What fixed the problem was having the router assign my mac address a different ip (using static dhcp), and no more problems.

Could anyone tell me why that occured? The Brian2 laptop is just sitting here in my office not being used.