wifi doesn't work with debian on laptop
 

I have installed Lenny on my Lenovo thinkpad laptop. When Vista was installed, I was able to establish a wireless connection, but now that lenny is installed, I can't. I presume this is because lenny does not have the correct drivers for my laptop's wifi card or something. Could I just get a usb transmitter or something? I don't know what wifi card is installed. How can I find this out without re-loading vista? Any solutions?

It's kind of hard to help if you don't tell us what wifi card you're using. Or are you waiting for us to guess? ;)
jdk

try running lspci or lsusb and posting the results.

The output of lspci follows:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
0c:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
0d:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
0d:00.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
0d:00.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 12)
0d:00.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
0d:00.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev ff

************************************************************************
There are two lines in here that could be the wireless card description:

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

or

0d:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)

I hope this helps.

It seems your card is the atheros one, and that it uses madwifi. Even knowing this, support for your card seems pretty recent, so you may still have trouble. I think the starting place is installing the packages 'madwifi-source' and 'madwifi-tools' (... maybe 'madwifi-doc'...). Here is a recent post on this matter I got by googling 'ar242x linux'.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....11abg-646443/

for the record, I use different hardware.

EDIT: maybe this page would be more interesting. Essentially they explain how to use 'module-assistant' tool to build the madwifi software from the 'madwifi-source' package.

http://www.debian-resources.org/node/6

Depending on what kernel you're using, you may have the ath5k driver. I believe that's the one you want. No need for madwifi.
Cheers,
jdk

I installed the wireless tool package:

aptitude update
aptitude install wireless-tools

I loaded the necessary kernel module:

modprobe ath5k

I verified my device has an available interface:

iwconfig

I raised the interface to activqte the radio:

ifconfig wlan0 up

I then configured the wireless interface by installing the network-manager-gnome package and enabling the connection. Still, I am not able to establish a connection. Any suggestions?
Thanks for the responses.

Does your wifi connection use wpa or wep? If the former you may need to install wpa_supplicant.
cheers,
jdk

Why depend on network manager junk when there is wicd and its in the repos (testing and unstable) ?

I am 99% sure that network manager makes a mess somewhere. Please do a "iwlist scan" as root to verify that the card works with the given module.

You'll need the backports repo enabled to get wicd for Lenny:

http://packages.debian.org/lenny-backports/wicd

http://backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

This problem was solved using another thread (wicd doesn't "see" my available router). It was solved by installing the latest kernal (even though I previously installed the latest dvd of lenny).
Also I did install wicd.

What was the latest kernel? 2.6.30? Is that what you installed and then used the ath5k driver? It will be useful to have the details of your solution for other users. :)
cheers,
jdk

I installed ALL the files in the kernel section, using synaptic. The versions for all of the kernel files were 2.6.30. Note that prior to installing the new kernel files, I did, at one point, type:
modprobe ath5k. However, I don't know if this last step is necessary (but you may want to try typing this if you are not having any luck and you are using a wifi interface that requires this driver which can be determined by reading: http://wiki.debian.org/ath5k).

Thanks MRJ,
Now if you are happy, can you just go into Thread Tools at the top of these posts and mark this thread as "solved".

Thanks,
jdk