I just purchased a D-Link DWL-G630 wireless NIC and DI-524 wireless router and would like to set up my linux laptop for wireless internet. My laptop is an old Compaq Presario 1200 running Debian testing and an unpatched 2.6.9 kernel from kernel.org. Plain old "wired" networking works just fine on this machine.

I downloaded the latest (0.12) ndiswrapper and installed it. I then downloaded the ndiswrapper-recommended driver for this card, which installed okay, but didn't recognize the hardware. I then tried to use the driver on the CD that came with the NIC, and it seems to work fine:

# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
mrv8k51 driver present
net5211 driver present, hardware present.

So far so good. Now I modprobe ndiswrapper with no errors. (For what it's worth, the Act LED is constantly on until I modprobe. After modprobe, the lights alternately flash at about 1 sec intervals). dmesg shows:

ndiswrapper: device wlan0 removed
ndiswrapper version 0.12 loaded (preempt=yes,smp=no)
ndiswrapper: driver mrv8k51 (D-Link,12/21/2003,2.2.0.19) added
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:00.0[A] -> GSI 9 (level, low) -> IRQ 9
ndiswrapper: using irq 9
ndiswrapper (NdisAcquireSpinLock:950): Windows driver trying to use uninitialized lock c2831418, fixing it.
wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:11:95:17:39:6d using driver net5211
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP, WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP
ndiswrapper: driver net5211 (D-Link,7/7/2004,2.2.4.32) added

Now, iwconfig gives me:

lo no wireless extensions.

dummy0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s
Encryption key:off
Link Quality:22/100 Signal level:-93 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

But now things turn bad. The all tutorials I've found for doing this tell me that things should either work at this point (they don't), or I should be able to iwlist wlan0 scan. iwlist on occasion will detect several cells and spit them out, but most of the time I just get:

wlan0 No scan results

I have played around with this for a long time, and can't figure out what triggers it to get results or no results. I have tried setting the essid to the proper name, off, and any, and also setting mode to Managed (which seems to be the default anyway), but nothing seems to make any consistent difference. Now, if I try ifconfig wlan0 up, it seems to work (no errors anyway), and ifconfig gives:

dummy0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr BA:F5:94:D6:15:C0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING NOARP MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:56 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:19152 (18.7 KiB)

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:68 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:68 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:19208 (18.7 KiB) TX bytes:19208 (18.7 KiB)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:95:17:39:6D
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:9 Memory:10800000-1080ffff

However, I still have no access. Pinging yahoo gives 'unknown host', And the access point listed when I run iwconfig remains 00:00:00:00:00:00. Have I missed a step here? Everything I've found indicates that this should pretty much just work. I've also tried setting up an eth1 and wlan0 in /etc/network/interfaces:

iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface wlan0 inet dhcp

But this doesn't help either. Any ideas? I would love for this to work. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Kevin

Your wireless card is not getting an IP address.

Try installing the WAP supplicant software and running it before bringing the card up.

I have it installed to run as a pre-up option for if-up.

Any ideas what i need in my .conf file for WPA supplicant? I don't know much about wireless protocols. I tried to put one together without much success. Thanks!

I had a similar problem. I found out that by logging into my router on another computer, and going through the wizard, but keeping everything the same, will then reset the router and allow my wireless connection. I actually have a post about it right now. The problem is I have to do it every time I want a wireless connection.

check out my thread at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=267782 and see if you can fix your problem that way.