Read all about it.

http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/.../products/2516

I truly hope it's successful, and I also hope they fixed a bunch of things that were difficult about the pre-official version! Maybe if I get courageous or foolhardy enough in a month or so, I'll give it a try. Meanwhile am sticking to 9.2 which took me many hours to get back into working order.

Nothing but best wishes for Mandrakesoft! They have a valuable product that can help a lot of folks transfer over to using Linux. I joined the Mandrake Club to help support them.

loving linux !!!

im a club memeber so i also got the news via email, i already have my http access to download it and im currently downloading cd 2 of 5 of the 10.1 official powerpack, will finnish it all by tomorrow. i just hope they alot of the bugs that were in 10.1 community.

Anyone tried to do a urpmi update from 10.0 official?

I'm going to subscribe to the Mandrake Silver membership and download 10.1. My father is coming up to visit me for Thanksgiving and I'd like to burn him my copies of Mandrake 10.1 (Powerpack) after I download them all. This isn't illegal, is it? I know you get additional stuff by being a member.

So does MDK 10.1 Official address dismal Wi-Fi card abilities and set up, or one still has to scramble to find the right driver? The lack of WLAN support alone will prevent me for paying anything for it...

What are you talking about?

I've installed 10.0 on a bunch of laptops with WiFi cards w/o a single problem other than having to enable ACPI.

Hopefully 10.1 will even go one better on this.

I have been trying to set up my D-Link DWL-650 M1 for two weeks now. The RTL8180 driver has such poor documentation, only extremely advanced Linux user could possibly get through after numerous hours of screwing around with it. I tried installing ndiswapper and the card seemed to activate, but nobody can explain to me (in multiple forums) in clear steps how to get it to connect to the router and get online. I am not a very experienced user of Linux, but I'd love to support Linux and have a lot of patience to get through "bugs". But some setup things like setting up wireless cards should be made more streamlined. I am hoping MDK 10.1 Official will have a wireless setup wizard of some sort with neccessary drivers, that's all...

The problem is with the card not Linux.

The Dlink's have been particularly problematic from the start, and Dlink keeps shifting the chipset vendors they use w/o informing anyone.

That particular card is SO bad, I threw mine out and got an Orinoco based card for one laptop and another supported card for a second.

This has NOTHING to do with Linux, but rather the Ti chipset used.

Ti dropped the chipset, and the tech was purchased by another small firm.

I don't know why you meantioned the RealTech driver as this does not work with the Ti chip used in this card.

It may be that you are inadvertently trying to configure a hardwired LAN interface on your laptop, confusing it for the WiFi adapter which is not detected or handled by Linux.

First of all, I am not blaming it on Linux. After reading a lot of stuff (and I could be reading better things in my free time) on this issue of cards/drivers/available code, I have come to realize that it's D-link that really sucks (although it works in WinXP just fine). From reading about DWL 650 M1 I learned that it's based on Realtech chipset and not TI.

I am not planning on buying another card just because the current one does not work under Linux. I'll suck it up and stick with my hardwired eth0. But this makes me feel like it's just another weak spot in Linux that Linux-bashers like to pick on...

Btw, when I installed ndiswapper and the card was up, the laptop could not see the card. How do you force it read wlan0 and NOT eth0? dhcpcd did not work, unless I screwed up. But may be we should take this off this thread...

You can set wlan to be an alias for the driver if you wish, but there is really no reason to do this.

Rather you configure the card as if it were a hardwired device.

You'll notice however that additional options will be available in the GUI dealing with encryption keys and the like.

Then you set it NOT to start at boot so you can issue the ifup eth1 command to bring it up whenever you want.

The iwconfig command can be manually utilized to try different configuration options and arguements.

For instance

iwconfig eth1 key AF43030412 mode managed essid myEssid

then

iwconfig eth1 dumps the information about the settings.

You can see if the card is talking to the WiFi router or not (and verify that it accepted say a wep key) by looking at the mac address of the router. If it comes back with say, 45:45:45:45:45 then the card is not yet talking to the router.

Once it is you should be able to issue the ifup eth1 command which applies the settings that can be found in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth1 and /etc/sysconfig/network. These are in turn what is set by the gui.

I did not set it do be wlan0, I just install the driver and it set the name.

How?

????

You said it was eth0?

Is it?

Run iwconfig to see which interface (driver actually) is assigned to the WiFi card.

If none is loaded modprobe the driver and try again.

If this still doesn't work, then you either have the wrong driver (which I suspect as AFAIK the DWL 650 never used the Realtec chipset) or you have ACPI turned off (kernel command line parameter in /etc/lilo.conf) and need to re-enable it to permit PCMCIA services to run and in turn Linux to detect the card.

Opjose,

Thank you for sticking around and looking into this issue. Your time and help are much appreciated. Here is what I have been doing:

1) Install ndiswrapper using D-Link CD with WinXP drivers.
2) I check
ndiswrapper -l

I get,

driver netr33x installed, hardware present

If I run iwconfig nothing comes back.
I then run
modprobe ndiswrapper
the card is up, both light are on, and iwconfig
returns info on wlan0 and its setting. The IP address, essid, key and the rest match the router settings. So I should be able to get online now? But when I open up the browser, it's dead. It is not "seeing" wlan0. What am I missing?