A little searching here is actually rather unsatisfying. Lots of people have the No DHCP offers error, yet the actual soltuions range all over the place. Most seem to involve rebooting EVERYTHING (computer, router, cable/DSL modem, the kitchen sink, the neighbors computer......) and then DHCP magically starts working. The only "odd" solution I've come across suggests increasing the number of IP addresses that the router is allowed to use via DHCP to 100. For some reason this seems to have worked for a couple of people.

I hate to nitpick at a product with such potential, but MAYBE this is a LITTLE deeper than just a configuration problem. I wanna make the switch to Linux, but right now it ain't happening.

I'm gonna try some more drastic stuff, I'll let yall know how that goes.

I second what most of the others have said. I can't get wireless going. I've been down the Linuxant road w/driverloader, tried ndiswrappers, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. I'm using Core 3 x86_64 on an HP laptop. My dhclient output was exactly like Kropotkin's. I have tried inputting a WEP code using "iwconfig eth1 key xxxxxxxxx." it seemed to take but i'm not sure this was the place for a WEP code. Linuxant's install process went OK and seemed to indicate success; just no wireless. My last shot will be to go back to Linuxant and see what they have to say for themselves.

Is there a proper forum to just bitch?

Another fhought for those of you wanting Linux on the network and your fed up with trying to get a wireless card working. If your system has a jack for an old fashioned lan wire, these network cards seem to always work w/o fuss on installation. Just plug it in and ask for DHCP on install.

I certainly can understand the frustration, but lets be sure to vent it in the proper direction. The reason all of us are stuck trying to get things like ndiswrapper and linuxant working is because many of the chipset manufacturers refuse to write drivers for linux and/or refuse to release enough information for others to do so. If your frustrated, ask your card manufacturer why they don't support linux.

ok...ive read through and read through and i couldn't find anything on why DHCP won't work...my best guess(s) is that A: we are all idiots. or B: we are all using NDIS ;/....My guess is that NDIS has trouble with DHCP in some for or another, when i checked ndiswrapper.sourceforge i found nothing to indicate this. So here is what i did...hardware (should all work the same, as long as ndiswrapper -l says your card and hardware is there).....


First off, i spent about 2 days reading man page after c code after info. Then i hit the forums. (linuxquestions, google groups, google/linux, linuxiso, slackware yadda yadda). And found nothing that would support i was doing somethin wrong with the configuration by trying to use DHCP. During my reading i also was playing with the lap top trying to screw with it enough to "make it happen" well here is what i came up with. I use slackware so your flavor may differ but basicly, after you tripple check that "ndiswrapper -l" and it states something about hardware and driver loaded/present. After confirming this. I then got to wondering so i updated my wireless tools package(do a sourceforge lookup). and did a "rmmod ndiswrapper" and a "insmod ndiswrapper" ping....iwconfig shows something. so i set it up like i would ethernet. in one command line, "ifconfig wlan0 10.10.10.106 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.10.10.255; iwconfig mode managed key restricted xxxxxxxxxxxx channel 11 essid blahblah ; ifconfig wlan0 up" (don't complain about the formating its how i do it. and wouldn't you know, little link light on the linksys card. So i try it out and find that i don't get name resolution OR ip res. so i checked my route table and found that my default gateway somehow got set to my loopback. ok. so i do a "route add default gw 10.10.10.1" so i can ping IP's but no DNS i check my resolv.conf file and there is something funky(mentioned in this thread) called search something something. So i remove that and through in my WAN DNS. deep breath....pray....wait for it.....ping google.com.....REPLY!!!....woot i did it, and only took me two weeks to figure out that ndiswrapper was half-working. I will take this time to point out that i am NOT COMPLAING about ndiswrapper, it is the single most usefull thing i ahve installed as of yet on my linux system. ( i know im a newbie....shut up) when you think about how hard it must be to port a closed-source driver into a program that will read it and make it work with your card....i mean...full out props are required here.

That being said...i hope this little story/rant helped someone out. btw whatever you do if you have a linksys v4 don't use the ndiswrapper -m command, it screws everything up. just (in slackware) add the "/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper" to /etc/rc.d/rc.M also to make life easier on your hands and keep you away from CTS....load all the network configuration int /etc/rc.d/rc.local this is what i did to make it work, and its cool.


Now for a question of my own...anyone know any *cheap* network cards (50USD$ish) that linux has support for that i can use some of the more advanced things in iwpriv for? mainly looking for promo mode and tx power adjustment here. And by support i mean has some fairly well mainted linux drivers, perferably their source nothing rpmish as rpm2tgz didn't work for me before.


Hope it helped if it didn't...rtfm...i did

ZagerStyle

Welcome to LQ and may I say, that is quite a first post. Congrats on your truly excellent taste in distros as well.


From my half-vast experience, ndiswrapper is probably one of the most finicky modules out there. I agree, major props to the ndiswrapper team. That said, I'm gonna quibble with a couple of points you have:



For me, DHCP worked the first time, and has worked every time. I think that there is a magic combination of nidswrapper version, kernel version and windows driver that you can't know without a lot of trial and error. On top of that, some distros like Red Hat have done things with their stock kernels that have made life truly nightmarish for some ndiswrapper users. Some users get lucky and hit the right combo early.

I honestly don't get this one. Pretty much all this command is doing is equating wlan0 with the ndiswrapper module. As far as I know (and I will admit I could be wrong), modifying modprobe.conf really can't screw anything up. You still have to modprobe to load the module at boot. I'd be willing to bet that some of the graphical front ends like KWifiManager or Yast are causing a lot more trouble than ndiswrapper -m.

As for cards, I'd look for ones with Orinoco or Prism chipsets. I don't know of any off the top of my head, but I know there have been a couple of threads about this.

YES YES YES!!! I finally got this mess working. At least in my case it's a simple fix, but I'm sure others will benefit from it. The solution actually came from another user on here. Props to Casper for the advice. Here's his respone to another user experiencing a similar problem...


The only reason why this could happen, is that you might have another network card which is trying to get an ipaddress. Only the first instance of the dhcp client will update the routing tables.

Try to do a ifdown eth1, ifdown <wireless card>, ifup <wireless card>. You could set all the network cards to start manually and the do an ifup ... everytime you boot, or you could use 'profile' to handle it; see Yast2....

Regards/Casper

right on man thanks, and it took me a while to decide, but from what i know (which is very little), it is the most unix like and one of the most configurable outside of
LFS and GenToo

ok cool i understand sorta...which kernel/ndis build are you using? im using whatever comes with slackware10 and the lastest stable of ndis...ill try and complie the newer kernel, when i figure out what my backup situation is ;/...apart from that i am using the RTL8180L drivers from realtek for my WPC11 v4...it uses that realtek chipset. I tried checking around at realtek...good luck there, talk about mindless "fill space" ;/




Im using fluxbox as my GUI, i don't have Yast, that is suse iirc, and im not sure what KWifiManager is...im assuming another front end for iwconfig&friends? However, as far as the config goes...i did it all using the CLI....well wait the only thing i did in run 4 was check my WAN DNS. So ill try again with backups and not start X...unless you mean the librays during the install?...not real sure. Also on the ndis -m thing...it seems that it would work ok, but the minute i reloaded the kernel(reboot) it says something about modules.conf being newer than /lib/something/modules.dep...when it reboots, having used that command it puts the cardmanager and PCMCIA modules in line AFTER the ndiswrapper module...at least that was with me...but if i just remove that "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" or whatever it was...reboot and it worked just fine with my custom scripts.
Cool ill look into this, ive heard alot of mention about Orinoco and Prism...correct me if im wrong but the Prism is the one thats nearly or fully opensource. I found a pretty cool site that had some cards and their chipsets listed...good for someone lazy like me ;/..




Final notes
First off thanks for the good things said about my post. After spending my last few weeks here, reading about everything that i could possibly that i somehow tried to relate to my situation, i thought that i would attempt to give something back. If and when i figure out if its the kernel/ndis versions or something else ill try and post it here...i don't document on paper well, but i have a good memoray ;p...

ZagerStyle

So far everybody uses dhclient, right? I'm using dhcpcd which works great. dhclient didn't work for me either. Maybe that combination is the problem?

Zagerstyle, that search site was something I wanted to know what it was about as well. Cause that shouldn't be in the /etc/resolv.conf file. Good job on getting your wireless working and the CLI is alwys the way to go over a GUI for configuring stuff.

right on, did you uncover anything about where it came from or anything? the search crap i mean. Tell you the trust minds a little numb today studying up for a test, so ill look into it after the test or after the hangover tomorrow ;p

Ummm, I am having these problems and I am not using ndiswrapper or the linuxant stuff; I am using a native, open-source driver, the prism54g. See: http://prism54.org/. Moreover, I get the impression that some people using the former are getting wireless working...

I'm using a custom 2.6.10 kernel and ndis 0.12. Actually the custom bit may be part of my success with ndiswrapper. I once saw a post from one of the ndiswrapper developers in response to someone having a compile problem and he said he had never complied it against a stock kernel, always against a custom kernel and he thought that the compile process probably left files behind that ndiswrapper required. That was a long time ago however, and hopefully they've cleaned up that behavior



Yeah, both Yast and KWifiManager are probably front ends for iwconfig. Personally, I think a script is the only way to go for configuration. Of course my thinking has been thoroughly corrupted by Slackware.

Weird. I've got the alias line in modprobe.conf and the system doesn't complain. Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Unless you really want to.


Yeah, if I remember right, it is the Prism drivers that are included in the kernel and those guys are really picky about how open source their software is.

I had the same problems with my Orinoco gold wireless card (old but works).
I got it to work by someones suggestion earlier. go into a console and type:
ifdown eth0 (hit enter) it will tell you what hardware device is going down (wireless card, or wired network card) in my case eth0 was my wired card
then try ifdown eth1 (hit enter)
that command shut down my wireless card
then type ifup eth1 (hit enter)
that should bring your wireless card back up!
I was having the same problems, could access router config, could browse local network, but could surf the web. Did the above and everything is running smoothly.

Here is an alternate solution I found through trial and error. Since I am not entirely sure what I was doing here, this may be equivalent to the previous solutions as far as the operating system is concerned, but I set up everthing with iwconfig, then

ifconfig eth1 down
dhcp -S eth1

on SuSE 9.1 with a Belkin card and native drivers.

EDIT:

I also had to delete/move /var/run/dhcpcd-eth1.pid each time.
Here is a script I use to make it a little more convenient:

I would also like to emphasize, that though this works for me, I don't really know what I am doing and this script must be run as root.