I just installed Core 2 on my laptop, and the wireless card won't work. Power light isn't even on. During the installation it autodetected and assigned to eth1, power light was on, not a problem, but now there's nothing. There is a light by the PCMCIA ports that is on, however.

If anyone can point me in the right direction on how to fix this I would be very grateful

Is your pcmcia daemon started? At a command prompt, as root user type:

chkconfig pcmcia --list

My output looks like this

pcmcia 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

Yours should look the same. What are the results of the chkconfig pcmcia --list command?

Mine looks exactly the same.

What is the make and model of your card? Having it setup as eth1 also sounds weird. Usually cards are assigned with the name wlan or in my case ath. eth cards are usually reserved for ethernet devices.

It's a linksys Instant Wireless ver. 3. I hoped that it would work right off the bat since the install detected it (even as eth1, I was happy to see two network devices listed). I can handle installing drivers but the fact that the power light won't even go on has me worried.

Hello

For the light/LED on the card to not light up indicates that the card or the circuit inside the computer that drives it may have a problem.

You may want to power up the computer without the card. After the system is completely up and you have signed on, then insert the card. Did you hear two beeps seperated about a second apart? If you did, your system knows the card is there and it's identified. If you did not hear any beeps, this could be a sign of a bad card or other internal problems.

It would be good look at /var/log/messages as root and see if there is any indication that the system saw the card.

I had the same problem with my orinoco gold. I deleted it then added the card back using the network device control feature. I first removed it then rebooted and then added a wireless card and voila it stayed. I've also done service pcmcia restart in the terminal to restart it. I'd try removing it then adding it again.

Great! I got it working by following what Cypionate said. Thanks to everyone that pitched in!

However, next question: when i activated it, it went right ahead and connected to a wireless network. Trouble is, I doubt that it's mine since I never had to put in our WEP passkey. However, there are several unsecured networks in this building, so I suppose it's one one of those. Where can I browse the available networks and get on the right one?

Use the iwlist command in a terminal to show available networks:

iwlist device scan

So if your wireless card is eth1 it would be

iwlist eth1 scan

I also use tkwifi found at tkwifi.sourceforge.net. You need perl and the Tk module for perl to get that one to work.

You can also put all kids of settings in your ifcfg-device file to ensure that it connects to your network by default. I don't have my ifcfg file with me right now, I can post it later if you think it might be of use to you.

I tried that, but it tells me that the interface doesn't support scanning

I don't know anything about your specific card. It sounds like it is a WPC11 version 3. You'll have to look around the wireless forum here and see if that card does support scanning. It also may be an issue of the card supporting scanning but the drivers don't.

Thanks, I appreciate your help

Here is my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0 file:

DEVICE=ath0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=no
STARTMOE=hotplug
WIRELESS=yes
MODE=Managed
USERCTL=yes
ESSID=myssid
KEY=mywepkey
IWPRIV="mode 3" # this allows my dlink card to scan


With this I boot up my machine, plug in my card, and I hit my network. I read that the last line is supposed to help my card do scans but it didn't really seem to work until I put the Type line in there. Give this a whirl and see if it works for you.