EDIT: It must have been a driver problem. The wireless card is detected and works fine under Ubuntu 6.06.

I've search the forums and Google for help on setting up my wireless card (an extremely cheap card bought off of eBay) on an IBM ThinkPad 600E. lspci confirmed it was using the ADMtek 8211 chipset.

I read a post on this forum from a few months ago where a user mentioned that he could get some connection with a similar card using Ubuntu 5.10, and since I had that very distro's installation CD, I tried installing that onto my laptop.

The installer didn't detect my card, but after installing, I did sudo modprobe adm8211 to load the driver for the card. cardctl status and cardctl ident both showed that the card was there, and sudo cardctl eject and sudo cardctl insert would cut power off to the card (indicated by the PWR/ACT light going off) and power up the card, respectively. So it seemed to be deteced okay. (I tried using Knoppix 5.0 to get the card working, and while the other commands would work, cardctl ident wouldn't show any info. I didn't try sudo modprobe adm8211, as I'm not even sure if the driver was available to load with Knoppix.)

So now to try to set up the network. iwconfig and iwconfig -a showed the eth0 interface for my card. I tried to bring up the network with sudo ifup eth0. The card's PWR/ACT light would flash several times, and I would see a few lines of "DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255", but I wouldn't get a DHCPOFFER.

I tried scanning for access points with sudo iwlist eth0 scan and I see the message "Failed to scan data : Resource temporarily unavailable".

I then tried setting the correct ESSID, mode (Managed), and the MAC address for my router using iwconfig. I still don't get a DHCPOFFER.

One strange thing is that the ACT light under WIRELESS on my router doesn't flash at all during the DHCPDISCOVER proccess, but at the very end of the process, after I see the message that no DHCPOFFERS were received, the router's ACT light will blink once.

So, it seems that my router picks up something. Does anybody have an idea what the problem could be? Could it be a problem with the driver itself, or a problem with my wireless configuration, or possibly even a problem with the card itself? I've read that others have been able to successfully set up wireless cards with this chipset, so I don't know where I'm going wrong. I would be willing to install a different distro if it would work correctly, but since I see the light flashing on the card it seems that the driver is loaded correctly, and that it's just something I didn't configure properly.

EDIT: Furthermore, iwconfig shows the following: