Wireless Connectivity in Fedora Core 8 on Dell Inspiron 8600
 

Greetings all!

I'm new to Linux and have been struggling with adapting my installation of Fedora Core 8 to work on my Inspiron 8600 laptop. The built-in wireless is an Intel PRO 2200BG Network Connection. Reading over this thread I removed NetworkManager, which had at one point picked up WiFi connections, and installed ndiswrapper and wpa-supplicant instead. Here's how things stand now:

From modprobe.conf in /etc:
My wireless network is being detected:
Currently, iwconfig reads as follows:
And ifcfg-eth1 in etc/sysconfig/network-scripts:
Running "dmesg | grep" for either "eth1" or "ndiswrapper" yields nothing. Perhaps they are not loading on startup? Or maybe I'm doing something else wrong? Please let me know anything I could do to resolve this issue.

Thanks so much in advance!

Since its is being identified as eth1 and when you posted the ndiswrapper -l output it is using the kernel ipw2200 module. This is the module you whould use and not ndiswrapper. the ipw2200 is really designed for that chipset.

Also the cell infinity_circuit is posted as wpa mode encryption. have you defined the passkey in your wpa_supplicant.conf since not using NetworManager or NM_CONTROLLED no

Brian

Brian1, thanks for responding so promptly.

I've uninstalled ndiswrapper and changed modprobe.conf to point eth1 at the ipw2200 module. Now, the following message appears on startup:

Also, wpa_supplicant.conf specifies the passkey for infinity_circuit.

First thing to do from here is turn off wpa on the router and try to connect to the router as plain connection no security. One thing I recommend is not use odd characters in networking names. Yes they may work fine but using just letters and numbers seems to eliminate the posiblilties of different OSes not understanding them. Just my experience working with multiple OSes. I know you are not using them but something i go by. Also you might post your unencryted passphrase it may contain something wpa in Linux cannot use. I have seen someone use a " in theirs which is fine in Windows but does not generate correctly in linux.

Brian

For a lot of characters, particularly those that have a meaning in a linux shell (and " would be one of those), you need to escape them in your config files and if you do that, they work fine. You also may need to encapsulate the entire passphrase in single or double quotes (which can get kinda funky looking if " is part of the passphrase). I recently ran across a network that used ? in the passphrase, and escaping each of the ? characters worked. So in Windows, you can get away with entering:

passphrase?

Whereas in Linux you might need:

"passphrase\?" or 'passphrase\?'

If the special character is in the middle of the passkey, do you still just need a single \, or would it look like this:

"pass\?\phrase"

I'm pretty sure that you just need the single \ so

"pass\?phrase" would probably work. From my limited experience, this sort of stuff seems to follow the normal rules for escaping characters in bash.

Thanks, Hangdog. Unfortunately, both with escaped special characters and with security disabled, eth1 still refuses to activate.

Have you tried no security yet? No sense fighting WPA if it is the network module or other config issue to begin with. One layer at a time.

Brian

As I said, I tried restarting the laptop with security disabled. I got the same error message both on startup and activating the interface after logging in as root.

OK with no WPA enabled on the laptop and the router then also change CHANNEL=1 to just CHANNEL= in the ifcfg-eth1 file.
As root issue the command ' /sbin/service network restart '

Brian

Still getting the same error, with security disabled and ipw2200 installed clean without ndiswrapper.

Added tags to post, please help!

I'd like to go back to Brian1's suggestion that you turn off wpa encyrption and see if you can connect that way. We need to figure out if you're having a driver problem or a wpa problem, and turning off wpa for a bit is the only way to sort that out. So try to connect without wpa and post the iwconfig and ifconfig outputs if you have trouble.

All security is disabled and SSID is broadcasting. Makes me a bit nervous, but nevermind that. My wireless connection is still called eth1.

ifconfig:
iwconfig:
When activating eth1 via the network configuration interface: