Wireless woes in ubuntu 7.10 (Netgear 54g USB adapter)

lewwy · 01-17-2008, 01:36 AM

Hey guys,

After much battling with ubuntu on my media center box, I've finally hit a brick wall.

My situation is as follows. I have a Netgear 54G Wireless USB adapter (I think its a WG111v2, could be wrong). I started out using network-manager, however this proved to be flakey at best. After much googling I discovered WICD which seemed to be the better alternative.

WICD held my connection a lot better, and all was well. Recently, however, I switched from ALSA to OSS under the misguided impression that my X-FI card would work. Suffice to say, it didn't, so I tried to go back to ALSA for my bargain basement Yamaha sound card, but I couldn't because WICD would get stuck on "Obtaining IP Address...".

This is the problem I'm having now. Whenever I go to connect to my Linksys WRG54G router, it simply gets stuck on "Obtaining IP address". It used to work fine, but its gone completely sour.

I've tried the same adapter on my windows machine and it worked fine, but no joy on my ubuntu box.

I reinstalled ubuntu from scratch, and this didnt fix it either.

If any lspci's (or whatever) is required then I'd be happy to oblige.

Thanks,

Lewis

lewwy · 01-17-2008, 04:05 PM

Any takers? Or I just reformat and install Windows Media Center?

ellendil · 01-18-2008, 09:52 AM

Hi Lewis,

I experienced the same error on my laptop from time to time, with the built-in wireless adapter (Intel 2200BG). From my understanding, this results more from a poor DCHP in the Wireless routers, which does not properly handle name resolution, than from the setup of your adapter itself. So far I had the best result on my Feisty with a package called "Wireless Assistant".

Anyway, a workaround for you could be to assign a fixed IP to your Netgear adapter. And explicitely provide the IP of at least one DNS server in the settings. Not the address of the router but preferably the address of the DNS of your telecom provider.

Hope this helps

Jeff

mcd · 01-20-2008, 05:15 PM

is the problem persistent across reboots? if you kill wicd (not just close it, but find the pid with ps and kill it) and then restart it, does that help? have you tried deleting the saved password and stuff for that network, then saving it again?

if none of that works, you could try unloading the modules for your network card and inserting them again.

lewwy · 01-21-2008, 02:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcd

is the problem persistent across reboots? if you kill wicd (not just close it, but find the pid with ps and kill it) and then restart it, does that help? have you tried deleting the saved password and stuff for that network, then saving it again?

if none of that works, you could try unloading the modules for your network card and inserting them again.

It was persistent across reboots, and killing WICD didn't help either. Manually iwconfiging to the network didn't help either.

As far as unloading modules go, I'm not sure how to do that.

Also, when I tried to install the network manager, it depends on kicker. Kicker is the KDE start bar. Why the hell network manager depends on kicker is beyond me.

Anyway, XP's on the machine for the moment. I'll switch back across when the next revision of Ubuntu is out.