Wireless on an old laptop

digerati1338 · 07-10-2008, 11:51 PM

I've got an old Toshiba Satellite 330CDT laptop (old might be an understatement) that I'm trying to revive as a word/email/surfing laptop Pentium MMX-266 with 64MB RAM. I've had success with a couple different distributions such as absolute linux, but have never had internet on it before. Now, I'm trying to install Debian on it and get a wireless card working.

The Wireless card is a Belkin Wireless G model F5D7010v7. Most places I've read say to use ndiswrapper.

I had a debian netinstall CD laying around so I used that to install a (very minimal) debian distribution. None of the default drivers I've tried worked, and it doesn't include ndiswrapper by default. So I went to the repo, grabbed the ndiswrapper-utils and ndiswrapper-common packages (checking dependencies), got them to the laptop on a flash disk, installed them with dpkg, and started setting it up according to some instructions on the ndiswrapper site. I ran:

Code:

ndiswrapper -i net8151.inf
ndiswrapper -d 1799:701f net8151
ndiswrapper -m
depmod -a

I also have the following output from "ndiswrpper -l"

Code:

net8185 driver present, hardware present

Now, when I try

Code:

modprobe ndiswrapper

I get

Code:

FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found.

I'm kinda stuck here cuz I don't know where to go next. One option is to download the full Debian distribution, but I'd really rather not waste 7CDS of packages I'm never going to use. Any ideas?

Greenfuse · 07-11-2008, 03:26 AM

Did the ndiswrapper package from the repo build and install the module, or just install a prebuilt one? If the latter, it might not be compatible with your kernel. An old debian with a new ndiswrapper probably is a mismatch.

I don't know much about debian but have used ndiswrapper so might be able to help.

digerati1338 · 07-11-2008, 11:22 AM

I used the prebuilt debian package from the official debian repository. I used etch and the etch package for ndiswrapper, so I believe they should be compatible. Compiling the module is not really an option because the minimal system I have right now doesn't have any of the stuff needed to build.

I should mention that I'm using the etch netinst CD, but I will upgrade to sid once I get internet access on the laptop. The kernel that shipped with etch is 2.6.18-5-486.

An alternate solution, of course, is to find a card that will work out of the box with debian. Anyone know some place I could find a list of these if I can't get this one working?

I found a list of the required packages at http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=74182#74182. With that list I only have to get the first full Install CD plus about 10 other packages. That should do the trick for me. I'll see if it works.

Update: Using that package list I was able to build ndiswrapper and it looks like my driver is working. I'm getting lights on the wireless card which is good.

I'm still having problems getting it to ping my router. Here is iwconfig output:

Code:

#iwconfig wlan0
IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"mynetwork"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:1A:70:XX:XX:XX
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:-2147483648 dBm Sensitivity=0/3
RTS thr:2432 B Fragment thr:2432 B
Encryption key:CC7F-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality:78/100 Signal level:-46dBm Noise level:-96 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rs invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

And

Code:

#ifconfig wlan0
Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:17:3F:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:192.168.1.105 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:415 .......
TX packets:18 .........
RX bytes:112134 (109.5 KiB) TX bytes:3456 (3.3 KiB)
Interrupt:11 Memory:12000000-12000025

I got there using

Code:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "mynetwork"
iwconfig wlan0 key blahblahblah

and

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 up 192.168.1.105 netmask 255.255.255.0

Connecting to a dhcp linksys router

I'm close but I can't get on the network. Any help?

onebuck · 07-11-2008, 10:20 PM

Hi,

What's your 'route -n'?

digerati1338 · 07-11-2008, 11:21 PM

"route -n" gives an empty table.

edit: unless I assign a static IP with

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 up 192.168.1.102 netmask 255.255.255.0

in which case I get:

Code:

Destination      gateway       genmask     flags    metric   ref   use   iface
192.168.1.0      0.0.0.0       255.255.255.0  U      0        0     0    wlan0

onebuck · 07-12-2008, 11:14 AM

Hi,

Your route for machine if the gateway is '192.168.1.1';

Code:

~#route add default gw 192.168.1.1
~#route -n 
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.1.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 wlan0
127.0.0.0       0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
0.0.0.0         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    1      0        0 wlan0

I don't use debian but you should have a network config file to setup all this with.

digerati1338 · 07-12-2008, 11:32 AM

I had already tried that, but even with 192.168.1.1 as the default gateway in my routing table, I can't ping anything. "ping 192.168.1.1" does not return any packets.

Resolved (kinda): I think it was a problem with the driver or ndiswrapper. Either way, I returned the card and picked up an Ativa wireless G notebook card. Took about 5 minutes to get this new Ativa set up with madwifi.

onebuck · 07-13-2008, 10:58 PM

Hi,

As for the data you provided before you did not have a default gateway assigned to the wlan0. That is why you could not get to other machines.