Have you tried ndiswrapper? What kind of wireless card do you have? (use lspci in a terminal window to see device info. Post the output to the forums, and some genius will know something:-))

Under Mepis, I tried ndiswrapper, but I could not get it to work right, and always froze the OS to the point I needed to use the six-seconds-power-off-button. Perhaps I got a bad driver from the www?

When this box had WinXP, the built-in wireless worked well, and the "sniffer" switch was nice to use.

Here are the possible wireless devices:
- Intel Pro/Wireless 3945 WiFi 802.11 a/b/g
- Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g
- Dell Wireless 1490 802.11a/g

Here is my lspci (I do not see any of the wireless choices):
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
0000:00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
0000:00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
0000:03:01.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ601/6912/711E0 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller (rev 40)
0000:09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0000:0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 UART (rev 01)

Thanks for any advice. It would be nice to leave the D-Link at home.

Where did you download the driver from? Also, are you dual booting with windows? If so, you can use ndiswrapper to pull the working driver from the windows partition. Here is the url to download the driver from the intel website: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/scri...ProductID=2259

I boot Linux only. When I was trying to get the internal wifi working, I surfed for days on as many Linux forum sites I could find, gathered a dozen drivers for each of the possible wifi cards, and tried them all. A couple times I had to reload the OS after getting a kernel panic. I gave up and went to old faithful (the D-link). I'm not so good at ndiswrapper, I suppose. Thank you for the link to the three drivers. I will try again.

First, check out http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.p...ng_Ndiswrapper

Second, a few things that don't appear in the link above. Use rmmod ndiswrapper to unload ndiswrapper before inserting the new driver.
You may find it necessary to use ndiswrapper -e <drivername> to delete all unused drivers.If they are there and not working, you should probably dump them. Use ndiswrapper -l to list all loaded drivers.
Hope this isn't all just a re-hash of stuff you already knew, and I certainly don't mean to insult anyones intelligence. These are just a few issues that I've bumped my head on.

I feel your pain. I haven't had any luck with ndiswrapper either. Luckily I have an Atheros based wifi card that was already recognized with Mepis(same chipset as your D-link)... Gotta love Madwifi.

I just tried to install MEPIS on a Thinkpad A31 laptop tonight, the laptop comes with Windows 2000 (and Silly IBM doesn't give you the windows installer CD's it's 'hidden' on the disk in it's own partition so I can't be as caveleer messing with this hard drive). I booted into MEPIS and resized the windows partition on hda1 (I only have one drive) 2GB smaller with GParted. I then added ext3 partitions and a SWAP partition in the 2GB of free space. I had to do it in extended space because (WINDOWS + / + /home + SWAP + IBM rescue = 5 which is more then hard limit of 4 logical drives) The problem is the MEPIS installer only has one choice for the ROOT it is forcing me to install over the first partition on hda1 which is where the windows install is!! The next two "/home" and SWAP drop down menus let me select the other ext3 partitions I created...

*On my other computer SuSE didn't try to protect me from myself it let me install Linux in the middle of the hard drive.

It was a size issue if you give MEPIS 3GB everything works GREAT!

Hey FPD, hope this helps.
ndiswrapper victory at last! here are some tips to hopefully help you in your quest...

since you have already tried configuring it, start here...
download the driver to your desktop.
open shell and type:
(login as root)- su
-password
linuxbox:# ndiswrapper -l <this will list all installed drivers>

Installed drivers:
net5211 driver installed, hardware present <yours should say “not present”>
linuxbox:# ndiswrapper -e net5211 <this uninstalles the drivers>
linuxbox:# unzip path/to/desktop/drivername.exe or .zip
inflating: drivername.cat
inflating: drivername.inf
inflating: drivername.sys

linuxbox:# ndiswrapper -i drivername.inf
installing drivername

linuxbox:# ndiswrapper -l
installed ndis drivers:
drivername driver present

linuxbox:# ndiswrapper -m
linuxbox:# modprobe ndiswrapper
linuxbox:#


then check out your network connections... you should be good.

hope this helps.

-Eric

Thank you for all this information. I think it works now.

I got Linux to work on my Dell 510 and since the wireless on Mepis worked out of the box while other distros did not, I liked it the best. I have loaded Linux a gazillion times since then, sometimes getting rid of it 15 minutes after loading. I guess it is time to start using virtualization so I don't waste so much time.

But to go back for a sec, not only did Mepis find the wireless card, it also supported WPA encryption (just search wireless and WPA, you will find what you need if you want to use it). However, for my dad and my sister, I really didn't want to stick them with pirated Windoze, and I was afraid they might not take to Mepis, so I started flirting with Ubuntu for a while. I got away from Mepis after 3.4 and finally got around to 6.0 recently. In fact, I finally got brave enough to put it on my Windoze box (desktop, not laptop), which I was afraid to do because of all the crap I have on it.

At first, I just booted with the live CD and worked on one of the 50 gig partitions to see if I could reduce it to 25 and use the other 25 for Mepis. The repartition worked beautifully (as good as any experience with Partition Magic). It recognized the swap partition and picked it up (I have had problems with that in the past, as I would make a swap partition and it would get ignored and the system would turn around and make its own). I did consider one more thing, which was to name different root and home partitions. Since I want to virtualize, I thought that the less complicated I make it, the better, and I didn't do that. I will just copy my crap from home over if I want to reorganize things later. I'm not sure how my virtualization experiment will go, or how much space I will end up using for that, although I know that 25 gigs is plenty for Linux. Oh well...

Anyway, back to the subject of the original poster. I saw the earlier posts warning people about putting 6.0 on an old laptop, but I want to upgrade my Dell, and bring the 40 gigs back into one distribution. It was fun to play with a couple of distros on it for a while, but I only need one distro on it. So I will upgrade that to 6.0 in spite of the possibilities that I could have problems.

The help here is phenomenal, and all of the problems I had switching to Ubuntu (with 19" widescreen monitors and other assorted things new to me using Ubuntu) were pretty easily found to have been problems for others, and I didn't have to make any new posts. These problems had been seen before and some very resourceful people had great information to get my sis and dad working pretty well. In fact, I just came here to search a pretty simple problem with Mepis coming up to a text screen instead of the GUI when I boot in. I have already seen the answer for that, and I should just remember, but I will have to hunt for it!

Anyway, I saw your post and I remembered the first times I tried to get Linux on a laptop and get wireless working. I wasn't about to run my router without WPA and BAM!!! It is easily done with a little help from the community. Sorry for the rambling! It's all here, good luck to you!!!!

I've found that Mepis dual boots better with XP, 2000, or Server 2003/2000 then it does with Vista. If one has a Wireless Ethernet bridge or the ability to plug into Ethernet, that makes searching for and installing wireless drivers and other peripherals a whole lot easier. I have never had much luck with ndiswrapper. I advise using true blue Linux drivers for most hardware.

Mepis worked fine on my Compaq C310 and dual booted perfectly with Windows XP MCE

Hi.
I use Mepis on my laptop. It is not a very common laptop (I mean the manufacturer), it is a BenQ Joybook 2100E. I am very happy to see that my hardware works perfectly. I'm running 6.0 now, but I plan to change it to 6.5, as I did on my desktop PC. Hope there will work everything perfectly, just as in 6.0. My Wireless just works fine, no display problems, sound is good, and the powersave module just works. I mean I can suspend to RAM, and wake up the system without problems. Not every distro could do that! Generally I'm satisfied with Mepis' performance on my laptop.

Hi, pusrob!

Glad to hear your experiences are good on your laptop. In a lot of cases, many Linux Distros --including Mepis-- can have more problems getting everything to work right on them than on desktop machines
.
My advice is, if you have a good install of 6.0 that works, _don't bother_ upgrading to 6.5.

That was/is just a waystation on the road to the 7.xx release. Mepis 7 is under development now, and it has indications of being more stable and more hardware-savvy than the Mepis 6.xx releases, or Ubuntu 7.04. With the use of the latest stable Linux kernel, even little problems like the built-in SD card slot in some laptops will be working. In the Mepis 6.xx those generally don't, due to the use of the 2.6.15 kernel in those versions.

My take on life in general is "If it 'ain't broke, don't try to fix it --or it will be!"

Just enjoy a good reliable laptop Linux --and whet your appetite for Mepis 7!

SilverBear

Is 7.0 out yet? If so, how does it behave? What kernel does it use?