hi all
i am a complete newbie to linux and am struggling a bit to get my head round it. i have an ipw3945 running fedora Core6
my friend has helped me load the drivers which after some reconfiguring appear to be ok but i am unable to get the wireless board to associate with any access points whilst running "wifi radar", it can see all access points but when trying to connect them it fails to aquire the ip address failing to connect, the strange thing is that it changes known access points from access point to ad-hoc's in the "wifi radar listings, my main objective is to run KISMET ....
I really need someone to hold my hand and lead me through the process of evaluating how this thing is working or not as it would appear to be,currently i am only able to connect to the internet through windows

If this is your access point, try turning off WEP long enough to see if you can connect. If you can, the problem is in the encryption setup. If not, you'll need to work back through the basic wireless NIC setup.

If you can the output of dmesg that may help give someone an idea of where things are going wrong.

If you go to a terminal window, try entering ifconfig and see what it tells you about the wifi interfcace. Should be wan0 or something similar.

Can you verify that a wired Ethernet connection works OK?

Hang on 'pentode' !? ... why should he bother checking 'dmesg' when he can see the access points with the wifi radar? Obviously he has the wireless card configured. So his output would look something like this. Obviously showing no problems. Waste of time.

ieee80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL'
ieee80211: 802.11 data/management/control stack, git-1.1.7
ieee80211: Copyright (C) 2004-2005 Intel Corporation <jketreno@linux.intel.com>
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, git-1.0.8
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2005 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection

Anyway, what I suggest you do is to connect up to the wireless router perhaps with your network cable and go the admin page (usually 192.168.1.1). Then remove all wireless security and make sure dhcp is enabled.

Then just make sure your fedora is running dhcp and try again.

If you still have problems provide more info and the output of 'iwconfig'.

being a "newbie" please bear with me, i can now associate with the AP getting the IP address and connecting to it although the brouser will not load the page and just hangs 'connecting to google.com...
the ether net connection on the machine works fine, and this was the way i "yumxed" the fedora core6 on the machine after first installation and got and installed the drivers and daemon for ipw3945.
in # iwconfig (it reads like this:-
IEEE802.11b ESSID "DEFAULT" nickname "DEFAULT" (DEFAULT is the AP SSID)
MODE: MANAGED
FREQUENCY 2.437GHZ
ACCESS POINT: 00:11:95:50:B9:5A
RETRY LIMIT : 15
RTS thr : OFF
ENCRYPTION KEY : OFF
LINK QUALITY : 46/100
SIGNAL LEVEL= -81dbm
NOISE LEVEL= -82dbm
RX nwid :0
RX invalid crypt : 0
RX invalid frag : 0
TX exessive retries : 0
INVALID MISC : 1567
MISSED BEACONS : 0

would anyone be able to tell me if this configuration seem right,
also i am trying to configure the power settings and have been unable to set it

# iwpriv get_power
answers no private ioctls
# iwpriv set_power
answers no private ioctls

any help would be greatfullt recieved with thanks