This is my first post here and I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

I was given this laptop and I'm hoping to get it working with my wireless access point at home. I have a PC card WiFi adapter if needed, but I've noticed a little antenna icon with an on/off button on the side of this laptop. A visit to the Toshiba website says that this means the laptop has builtin WiFi.

No WiFi card shows up during bootup (or else I'm not recognizing it in dmesg), but I'm wondering if it might be only detected under XP. I've vaguely heard about something called ndiswrapper that should be able to access this card using a MS driver.

Can anyone suggest what I should do to use this built in WiFi?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

Open a konsole and type "lspci".
This should show you something like,
"Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc.: Unknown device 001a (rev 01)"
This will give you a better idea of what type of card and if your kernel picks it up.
"ndiswrapper" is usually only needed for MS Broadcom drivers.

try this site forum page.
http://www.mepislovers.org/modules/n...d=1147&forum=6

you will need ndiswrapper and the required ndis drivers,

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
http://pcsupport.toshiba.com/

if you are running memphis from the laptop, did you install the wireless tools.
if not you will need to download them and install them as well.
there are many howto's on setting up wireless on newer laptops. i myself have setup wireless support under fedora core 4. using ndiswrapper.

hope this helps
david

Thanks for both of your responses!

I ran lspci and got:

0000:00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82551QM Ethernet Controller (rev 10)

Is this WiFi? (The laptop also has a wired ethernet port which I'm using as I post this).

I'll check out the mepislovers, toshiba and the sourceforge sites for the ndiswrapper stuff.

Thanks again,
Mike

That is the wired ethernet port you should also have another "Ethernet controller:" listed for the wireless.
Make sure the wireless is turned on (maybe reboot) before trying "lspci".
If all else fails you could get the name/number off the card its self, look on the bottom of your laptop, one of the small covers is for the wireless card.

OK, I'm getting closer. It turns out that there wasn't a wireless card installed! I found a refurb one on http://www.getpartsonline.com for $20 and installed it today.

I went to the mepislovers website suggested by David. The instructions said to run modprobe ndiswrapper and then iwconfig. I did this and these details of my card are shown:

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"" Nickname:"HERMES I"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.457 GHz Access Point: 44:44:44:44:44:44
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff

Not sure where to go from here though as the instructions on the mepislovers page get a little foggy at this point.

KWiFiManager's window keeps looking for an access point but doesn't find one. I'm filtering by MAC address and have added the address to the table in the router. The router works with my Windoze laptop ok.

What's next?

MEPIS has a OS center where you can set the wireless settings.
Or edit the "/etc/network/interfaces" file manually with something like the below (change #'s as needed):
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.110
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1
dns-nameservers 68.86.67.196 68.86.68.196 192.168.1.1
dns-search HERMES I
wireless-essid HERMES I
wireless-ap 44:44:44:44:44:44
wireless-mode Managed
#wireless-key ????-????-????-????-????-????-??
pre-up modprobe ndiswrapper
post-down rmmod ndiswrapper

For DHCP change "static" to "dhcp" and put a "#" in front of the first 7 lines.
Now type "/etc/init.d/networking restart" to restart with the new settings.
Now type "ifconfig" and "iwconfig" to make sure everything is set right.
(All this will need to be done as root)