Hi there,

I've been trying for a while to get a wireless card of
some sort to work using Linux, but haven't had much success.
I'd like to (eventually) use a small PC ( Via EPIA MII )
in my electric Mini to watch over the battery charger, so
I don't have to go out in the rain to check my batteries :-)

Presently, I've got a no-name Orinoco Gold clone card
( seems to have the Prism chipset in it, and a sticker on
the back saying Agere systems, but no sticker on the front )
which I bought on Ebay ( might not have been a good buy! )

The wireless router is a netgear WGR614.

Most of the time, it simply won't connect, and any changes
that involve taking the network interface down, then bringing
it up again take ages ( minutes ).
Normal ethernet connections work fine, BTW

the only time I've got wireless to work was when I tried MandrakeMove,
with encryption switched off ( yikes! ). then it worked fine.

But every time I try enabling WEP encryption, I can't connect.
I've checked and re-checked the keys until I'm going mad, it
just won't work!

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks
electricmini

are you using ndiswrapper, or the prism drivers native to linux (see the wiki under wireless network, prism install) you should be able to do iwconfig key sassword or iwconfig key [big o'l string of hexidecimal barf] on each macine (poss set in your /etc/pcmcia/network script)

Hi Ghost_runner,

Thanx for the reply,

I'm using the native Linux drivers, first I tried the latest version of the
wireless tools package & the orinoco source, on my big monster
Athlon system ( wireless card is PCMCIA, the tower system has an
adaptor card in, which works fine ). This is on Mandrake 10, with
2.6 kernel compiled from source.
( which has an annoying feature: every time I change any hardware,
X refuses to start. Specifically, I have to reinstall the nVidia X driver
and copy a backup of my XF86Config-4 into the right place. Grrr )

No joy

Then I tried MandrakeMove ( from this month's LinuxFormat DVD )
and also Mandrake10 beta2 on the laptop
( an old Acer travelmate )
This worked, but only with encryption switched off.

I've even tried Knoppix 3.6, but no luck, even with no encryption.


I noticed something last night:

Using

iwconfig eth0 encryption

I get an answer that suggests the card supports 40 or 140 bit encryption
Can this be right? I thought WEP was 64 or 128 bits?

Maybe I need to upgrade the card's firmware?

Thanx for the links, I'll check them out.

Regards
electricmini

sorry bout the long times between replies, i drive a semi, and only have access when i'm at certian truckstops. I don't use wep, so i can't help much there, but i remember that it uses 64/128 bit as well. Are you running both cards (wireless and wired) at the same time? I haven't done the upgrade to 2.6, i've heard of a few bugs in it, and there are not any features in the upgrade that i currently need.

Hi Ghostrunner,

No probs about the long time between replies - thanks for the help!

I've tried quite a variety of things, some running 2.6 kernel, some 2.4,
and am still having trouble. I have managed to get it to work using a
Sitecom USB adaptor with Windows, so I now have hardware that
works, I just need to sort out the Atmel Wlan drivers.

I've just got a VIA EPIA board as well, so plenty of stuff to try out.

Oh yes, the test I've done involve both a laptop with just the
wireless card ( no other network card ), and a tower machine
with both wireless and ethernet cards in it.

I'll keep trying stuff - eventually I'll hit a combination that works!

Regards

Electricmini

as far as the encryption goes have you tried

iwconfig eth0 key s:yourpassword

or

iwconfig eth0 key [bunch of hexidicamal garbage, but s: is easier]